I want to put a few of my movies on SD Cards for use on my X3i while I am at my daughters Volleyball practices. I know that I need software, but what hardware is required to be able to do this? Do I need to have a DVD drive in my desktop? Since I don't plan on burning anything to a CD do I need a CD burner in my desktop?

Thanks,
-Eric

You'll need a DVD drive on your computer, but a CD burner is not required. (DVD drives are cheap if you watch the ads; I got one a few weeks ago for $10 after rebates.)

As for other hardware, you'll need a hard drive with several unused GB for temporary storage during ripping/conversion. Also, processor speed and RAM will make a difference, but I don't know the recommended minimums.

Hardware wise you only need a DVD-Rom. As far as available diskspace it depends on what you are encoding. If you plan to encode a full length movie I would recommend atleast 6 - 8 GB available diskspace on your HDD. Certainly plenty of system memory and a fast processor is good for encoding. I have encoded on an IBM Thinkpad running a PIII at 700MHz with no problems. The runtime it took for me to encode a 90min movies was a little over 5 hours.

Thanks for the help. The drive space isn't an issue, I just needed to see if I required a DVD-Rom drive or not.

Thanks,
-Eric

Check out my site VanHlebar BigDs Video Guides that should get you started and if you got any more questions post back here and these folks around here will sure stear you in the right direction....

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