When my Aunt died recently I inherited a lot of old cine films transferred onto DVD - how can I move them to my Macbook Air? The films are of me and my extended family from 50+ years ago so it would be great to share with them.
MacBook Air 15″, macOS 15.3
If these DVDs are of the type expected to be played back in a DVD player, then you could use an application such as the open source Handbrake for Mac to rip the video files from the DVD disc to a folder on the Mac. From there those files may be imported into and played back by the TV application.
If these cine films were simply collected and stored as video files on DVD discs - not playable in a DVD player - then you should be able to insert the discs into a compatible optical drive, open the disc as a folder in Finder and copy those files to the Mac for playback. You might possibly be able to play back the files directly from the DVD folder with appropriate video playback software. VLC Media Player is one such app that might work for you. VLC would be capable of playing video files stored on the Mac's startup drive.
If these DVDs are of the type expected to be played back in a DVD player, then you could use an application such as the open source Handbrake for Mac to rip the video files from the DVD disc to a folder on the Mac. From there those files may be imported into and played back by the TV application.
If these cine films were simply collected and stored as video files on DVD discs - not playable in a DVD player - then you should be able to insert the discs into a compatible optical drive, open the disc as a folder in Finder and copy those files to the Mac for playback. You might possibly be able to play back the files directly from the DVD folder with appropriate video playback software. VLC Media Player is one such app that might work for you. VLC would be capable of playing video files stored on the Mac's startup drive.
If these are home DVD-Video discs, you may be able to use Disk Utility to create CD/DVD disk images (.DMG files) from them.
You could mount (open) these .DMG files on your Mac, and play them as if you were playing the actual DVD-Video discs themselves; or use the .DMG images to help you burn copies of the DVDs (from the Finder?).
Transcoding from the MPEG-2 video on a DVD-Video disc to another format may result in files of formats that are more convenient for modern software, but may also result in some quality loss.
Thank you so much - most helpful 👍🏼
You're welcome.
Transferring home DVDs to Mac
