I’ve already bought DVDs that included digital copies. This is the ability to also watch the movie from my tablet. However, only certain new DVDs come with this ability. What about my existing DVDs?
Well, Vudu.com finally found a solution that the movie distributors are ok with – well some anyway. If you download Windows program from vudu.com, you can insert your DVD movie into your computer and it’ll tell you if you can convert it to digital. It’s actually not a conversion. It’s more accurately a right to watch it digitally. That right costs $2/movie. But, if you convert more than 10 at a time, it’s only $1/movie.
So, I took about 60 DVDs and inserted them one at time to let it tell me if I could get the digital rights. About 20% of them it couldn’t identify the movie title. And about 30% it could identify the movie title but said it was ineligible.
The actual conversion is instant. These movies that qualified are already on Vudu. So, for $1, it gave me the right to watch them digitally from Vudu. Vudu has apps for tablets as well.
Some notes. I wish it had the ability to eject the DVD from the app. I had to switch to Explorer and eject the DVD after each identification attempt. Twice it let me know that I already had digital rights, thus saving me the cost of “converting.” That’s a nice feature. And I can switch between viewing my purchased DVDs and the conversion procedure without losing my list of titles. Once I’m done creating the list, I just hit purchase and it’s instantly charged to my credit card. After that, access to the movies are instant as well.
Other than not being able to convert all my DVDs (I couldn’t convert Star Wars movies, but I could convert Harry Potter, classic and Matrix movies), it was a good experience. There is an option to upgrade to a higher resolution than standard DVD for $5/movie (50% off also, if more than 10 are converted at once) – but I chose not to pay this higher fee.