Everyone likes watching a good DVD, but only a frequent flyer can fully appreciate the medium. Imagine being stuck on a seven-hour nonstop coast-to-coast flight. If you're lucky, you'll sleep through most of it. But if you're not, you'll be bug-eyed with cabin fever before you fly over Denver. Remedy: Pull out your handy-dandy laptop and pop in a DVD. Now you've got yourself a mini-movie marathon.

Oh no! You've got one of those ultraportable laptops without a DVD drive -- or worse, a larger model so big, you can't comfortably open the DVD tray. How will you watch all your DVD discs to occupy the remaining five hours? I'll show you how on today's episode of "Call for Help."

What you need is DVD-Toolbox, a DVD-backup application that also lets you save the VOB files straight to your hard drive. This means you can rip a few DVDs to your hard drive prior to your flight and watch all of them without needing to insert a DVD. The added benefit is that you use less power, since you're not using that hard-to-reach DVD drive. Sure, other apps let you do the same thing, but DVD-Toolbox is a no-brainer. You can even compress video straight to your hard disk and still have room for several more movies.

Easy to use

1. Select the Source Drive with your DVD.
2. Select the working folder (i.e. where you dumped the files to).
3. Select your favorite audio. DVD-toolbox will strip out all audio except for what you select, reducing the space needed.
4. Include subtitles. Click the one you want to have or none if you like watching a movie without words on the bottom.

More settings
The settings let you tweak DVD-Toolbox a little. Remember, what DVD-Toolbox lacks in features it more than makes up for in simplicity. There are only two options you should worry about: Delete Temp files after burning (if you plan on burning backup copies of a DVD) and Split DVD.

Split DVD lets you span a large movie that won't fit on a single DVD disc. Leave this unchecked and DVD-Toolbox will recompress the video to fit on a single DVD-R. It's great for saving space so you can cram more movies on your PC.

Download DVD-Toolbox now