How can I transfer video from a homeade DVD to my PC in a way so I can e-mail the video?

I have no USB cable for my camcorder so I copied my video to a DVD and was going to save the DVD to my computer so I could e-mail it. I tried saving the DVD many ways to the computer but it won't save or copy, it just automatically plays the video. I tried attaching the DVD to the e-mail but only .usr files were available to attach. Is there any way to send it or should I just get a USB cable? And if I get a USB cable do I need to get software too (none came with cam) with Windows XP?

How can I transfer video from a homeade DVD to my PC in a way so I can e-mail the video?ireland

Okay, there are just so many issues here I don't even know where to begin.

First you need to know how these things work before I try to explain to you why this is impossible.

A DVD has a capacity of about 4.7 billion bytes.

Emails providers (like yahoo, hotmail, or any other ones) usually let you attach a maximum of 10 million bytes worth of stuff. Which means that you would need to split the video in 470 parts, send 470 mails, and then the other person needs to recieve all of those, download all 470 attachments, and then stitch the movie back together.

Let us assume that you are willing to do that or let us even assume that there is a way to email 4.7 billion bytes worth of data. Do you have any idea how long it will take for you to first upload the movie, and then for the other person to download the movie? I seriously hope you have like a T1 connection because something like even DSL/Cable will be too slow. If you were to use your DSL connection (at maximum capacity which you never get) it would take you about a week to upload the movie and then the same time for the other person to download the movie. Here a week means seven days AND NIGHTS, continuously. Your computer needs to be on and you cannot use the internet to do ANYTHING else.

Now the next question you should ask is, "well, can I just make the movie smaller?" and the answer is yes you can make it smaller...but NOT SMALL ENOUGH. You can reduce the uploading and downloading time to about 2 days but it will still be to big to email.

If you forcibly make the movie so small so that you can email, you will degrade the quality of the movie sooooooo much that the naked human eye won't even be able to see it. I don't think you can even do that even if you wanted to. The screen size of the video will be ridiculously small and such horrible quality.

Just to let you know, it wouldn't have made any difference if you would have transfered the movie using USB (or rather I think you mean firewire). It still would have been the same size. Actually it would have been ever bigger.

You actually chose the better of the two options because this is a lot easier than trying to record it onto your computer, edit it, and then encode it in DVD format. The best way to get video into your computer is to record it as a DVD unless you want to do some really fancy stuff with it (like matrix style special effects) because for that you better have top of the line hardware (uncompressed take up a looooooooot of space nad processing power) and you better have state of the art software (no windows movie maker won't do the job).

Just for your information, in case you need to "save" a DVD on your computer (for some only God only knows what reason, unless you are blackbeard pirate and running away from the MPAA for releasing illegal copies on the internet), you cannot simply copy and paste it. The same is true for audio CDs as well. The songs cannot be simply copied and pasted.

The technology industry has a very advanced and sophisticated words for that called "ripping". You say you want to rip a CD or you want to rip a DVD onto your computer.

And for that, there is software available. Some are free. Some cost money. Some cost a lot of money depending what it is you are ripping and what do you want to ultimately do with it. I don't think you need to concern yourself with that...so DON'T WASTE ANY MONEY ON ANY SOFTWARE.

And don't get a USB (rather firewire) cable either.

My advice...just mail the DVD!!!

Feel free to contact me if you need any more help or have any questions.

PS: in regards to answers below me...

Compressing the movie will not work (as I said above). It will still be too big. Email is usually limited to aboutu 10MB and things like yahoo messenger are limited to about 100MB and remember even if you could, you are STILL limited by your own internet service provider's uploading and downloading speed. Even on DSL/cable it will take you days to send that stuff.

Compressing the movie using DivX or something is still too big.

The only time you can do this is when it is a little clip less than 10 minutes at questionable quality perhaps.

How can I transfer video from a homeade DVD to my PC in a way so I can e-mail the video?microsoft outlook internet explorer

Well, if its in DVD format. Download a program like DVDx (I think its free) and convert the dvd into a normal video file for your computer (this will make the file way smaller sending the files off a dvd that will be HUGE, thousands of megabytes instead of maybe a hundred megabytes). Then e-mail the video.
There is no way u can transfer by mail that quantity of data!A movie is a verry big file to mail`it.Maybe u can try to send the video by a messenger software,but it takes o lot of time.
the question is did you write the video as a DVD format OR as a normal file like movie.mpeg

Anyway i think the bst thing u should do is get a prog that can transfom DVD format into MPEG or AVI Format
When you insert the DVD in the drive of your pc, go to Start%26gt;My Computer, right-click on your DVD-Rom drive, select Explore. A window will open showing you all the files on the DVD. These will most likely be VOB files and extremely large - too large to email; you will need to convert VOB files to a format like DivX, in effect compressing them.