Is there a way to save a DVD movie onto the HD and watch it from my laptop or do I have to use DVD discs? Sorry if there was a previous thread on this, I tried to search for it but I wasn't able to find anything.

If you have all DVD files on hard disc, you can use any player to read these files.

Some examples are Media Player Classic, VLC player (both free), PowerDVD (not free but often included in many retail burner boxes and also preinstalled in laptops), WinDVD (as the previous), etc

Yes, just choose a place form the source dropdown box or uncheck Delete temporary files when done in common settings>general

Correction; Above shoud read Target dropdown Not Source dropdown box.

It can do this and more. The features are summarized in the link in my sig (the red one).

Thank you all for the help.

Also I want to put these on a laptop as I am taking a vacation soon and would like to watch some movies while I'm on the plane ( it is a 27 hour flight) Would it be best to use Generic Mobile or Main Movie?

The screen resolution is 1280 x 800 if that matters.

Wow, that's a long pull! You will be able to cram more on there if you use the MPEG-4 modes; the Generic profile with the default bitrate of 900kb/s produces really good images for a laptop size screen. Be sure to preview the conversions to AVI if that is what you decide to do to make sure there are no glitches or audio sync problems. If HDD space is not an issue, I still prefer the DVD to DVD modes (Main Movie, etc.).

I'm assuming by 'long pull' you mean the flight? Yeah, I'm going to visit a friend in Vietnam, if the flight time wasn't already long enough there is a 13 hour layover in Korea, Seoul (sp?) I only have about 100 GB free space on the HD left but I can always clean it up when I get back. How much space does a movie take up in each mode? I don't think AVI would be a bad choice. The screen says it is a WXGA High-Definition Widescreen with Brightview Technology it that helps.

Yea, that flight would be rough. Typical sizes: depends on the movie and the settings you use. If the movie fits on a single layer disc, about 4.5 GB for a DVD folder, about 1 GB for an AVI of reasonable quality. Lots of the recent movies run 6-7 GB for the video files, around 1.5-2 GB for the AVI. If you have time to experiment some before you go, you can trick DVDFab into really crunching DVD files by setting the "Default DVD5 Size" in Common Settings-->Write to say 2500 MB. This will let plenty of movies fit on your HDD with room to spare and will have the added benefit of no A/V sync isssues and faster processing time than creating AVIs. I just tried this with Family Guy season 2 Disc 2 (7 22 minute episodes) compressed 37% and it looked great. You would want to set the DVD5 size larger for longer movies and try one and see how it looks on your system.