I don't have an external DVD player that I can connect to my computer - is there any way to capture video from a DVD placed into my internal DVD-ROM drive?
I think you want some sort of DVD ripper. I could throw names out but I haven't done this in years. I'm sure Thrax can recommend a way if no one else can answer you before him.
Thrax wrote a couple of guides, but I couldn't find them.
Here's one at Icrontic. Thrax's guide well give you more options, if you can find it, but I think Deke's method in the Icrontic guide is a little simpler.
What I do is follow the first half of Deke's guide for ripping the DVD, and the second half of Thrax's (so I can encode with XVID).
Try DVD Shrink, it's a great DVD Backup program, it takes the DVD you have and takes out all the stuff you dont need like Foriegn languages, extras and stuff liek that to make it small enought to fit on a normal DVD-R or DVD+R, or you can just leave all that stuff in it. You can save the DVD as an Image or a video filetype (cant remember which one exactly) But I love the program so far. You can find it on google.com somewhere and it's free which is great. But if you have MaximumPC Magazine the link is in there in the "Top 10 Greatest Apps You Never Knew Existed" article.
Try nero's RECODE its easy to use and does a good job, for protected stuff you'll need dvd idle pro also but be aware of your countries restrictions regarding css, if you going to dual layer try blindwrite as well (blindwrite will not compress) I am only new at Backing up but these work fine for me.
Comments
Here's one at Icrontic. Thrax's guide well give you more options, if you can find it, but I think Deke's method in the Icrontic guide is a little simpler.
What I do is follow the first half of Deke's guide for ripping the DVD, and the second half of Thrax's (so I can encode with XVID).
//EDIT//
Here's the link to the site :-)
http://www.dvdshrink.org/