is there any way of putting DVDs onto the computer so that I can watch them without having to carry a load of discs with me?

cheers
andrew

yep, dvdshrink is free and rips them from the disc to your hard drive as a .iso disc image file. you can then open that image with something such as vlc media player just like it would play it off the disc.

this takes up about 4.5gb per disc, though, so if you want a lot of them then there are more elaborate techniques to reduce just the film, rather than the whole disc, to around 700mb each. but it’s a long story…