How Do You Play A DVD on A Laptop Computer?

In this guide, we will show you how to play the DVD movies on your laptop computer, along with ripping the movie on to your computer if you prefer to keep a digital copy instead.

Play a DVD movie on a laptop using the built-in disc drive or an external USB-enabled disc drive

Insert DVD

Insert DVD to laptop built-in disc drive, the laptop may has a combined DVD/CD reader/writer on the side of the keyboard.
If you have an external disc drive, insert the USB plug into one of the ports on your laptop.

Open the disc tray and insert the DVD. Close the tray.

Choose a player

In Windows, choose the Autoplay option in the pop-up box. Next, choose the default media player to view the DVD.
If you do not see Autoplay, navigate to the My Computer folder and right-click the drive. Select Autoplay.

In macOS, use DVD Player to watch the movie.

Alternatively, download VLC or another third-party media player from the Internet.

Play the movie

After choosing a media player, the movie should start playing. 
Use the on-screen controls to play, stop, fast-forward and rewind the DVD.

When the movie finishes, close the media player, and then press the button on the disc tray to eject the DVD from the drive.

Play a DVD movie on laptop by ripping DVD to digital files

Three reasons why you need to rip DVD to digital files for playing on laptop:

1. DVD disc is easily to become scratched, lost, stolen, or otherwise useless, rip dvd to digital file, you can backup them on your hard drive forever.

2. It is not very convenient when you want to watch DVD movies on your laptop you should insert the DVD disc to your laptop disc drive.

3. It is a bit nosiy when the laptop disc drive working, makes you hard to hear every detail of the dialogue.

If you’re only looking to backup homemade discs right now, the Handbrake should be your best choice, you can follow the guide here to rip your unencrypted homemade disc, such as one of your wedding to digital files for watching on laptop.

Making copies of commercial discs (such as Hollywood movies) requires an extra step that isn’t necessary for homemade discs. Commercial discs are encrypted to make copying them a little more difficult. The rest of this guide will show you how to bypass that encryption, rip encrypted DVD for watching on laptop.

How to Rip DVD to Digital Files for Laptop Computer

The trail-before-purchase version availabel for you, the watermark is the only limitation between the trial version and full version. Here in this article, Windows version screenshots were taken as example, the Mac version shares the same steps, just keep in mind you have download the right version, Windows platform .exe files cannot be installed on macOS – and vice versa.

Step 1. Import DVD files

Insert DVD disc into your laptop computer's DVD drive or external disc drive. Then click "Load DVD" and import your DVD movies. You can also add DVD folders, ISO image files or IFO files.

Tip: If you need to rip DVD with wanted subtitles and audio track, you can click the drop down menu after "Subtitles" and "Audio" to select your desired tracks.

Step 2. Choose output format

Click the "Format" option, and choose H.264 MP4 or MPEG-4 from Common Video profile list.

If you want to keep 1080p resolution as source movie, you can choose those format from "HD Video" category.

Tip - Advanced Settings:

If you like, you can click "Settings" to change the video encoder, resolution, frame rate, etc. as you wish. Keep in mind the file size and video quality is based more on bitrate than resolution which means bitrate higher results in big file size, and lower visible quality loss, and vice versa.

Step 3. Start DVD to MP4 conversion

After all the settings, click the Convert button to start converting DVD disc to digital MP4 files for watching on your laptop computer.

You can view the conversion progress and are able to cancel the converting process at anytime.

When the conversion is over, click "open" to locate converted DVD movies.

Then, you can play the converted DVD movies on your laptop or transfer them to any portable media players and devices as you like.