Tip: View DVD ISOs in VLC

How many acronyms can I put in one title? :)

If you archive any of your DVDs into ISO images (think of it like a ZIP file of a movie disc), you can access them directly, without extracting them first, as DVD movies by using VLC!

This article, via Hackszine shows us how we can do it:

Steve Anderson wrote in about an underused feature of our favorite open source video player, VLC.

I discovered yesterday that the wonderful VLC media player has the ability not only to mount a DVD directory that's been ripped to the hard drive, but also to play a .iso image of a DVD. Seeing as I've been using it for ages without knowing this was possible, I figured a lot of other people would be ignorant to this feature!

Maybe you want to test an ISO that you've created before burning it to a disk. Perhaps you'd like to store your DVDs to your harddisk without transcoding them, retaining all the menus and special features. Using VLC, you should be able to do either by entering a "dvd:" url in the Open dialog box.

Example URLs to Open and play a DVD ISO:

Windows - dvd://c:/somedirectory/dvdimage.iso

Linux - dvd:///home/username/dvdimages/dvdimage.iso

Example URLs to Open and play a ripped DVD folder:

Windows - dvd://c:/somedirectory/DVDFOLDER

Linux - dvd:///home/username/dvdcopies/DVDFOLDER

Resources:

VLC DVD Trick - Link
Get VLC - Link

via [Hackzine]