Can you copy dvd's to the hard drive with media portal, i can't find anything about it on the website.
While I don't own the software I took a quick look through the documentation and while it says it stores your movies I don't believe it allows you to rip DVDs to your computer. Ripping DVDs typically involves breaking the encryption on the DVD which violates the DCMA (we're talking US laws here) and is thus illegal. If you have movies on your computer, you can put them in Media Portal's folder and it will store them and allow you access to them through Media Portal.
Media portal just runs on top of windows, just close the program, use whatever program you want to copy the dvd onto your machine, put it in the film directory and you can watch it through media portal
Yep, something like DVD Fab Decrypter would do it. So long as you are in a country that allows you to legally make backups of your DVDs. I would have thought that there would be a plug-in to enable MP to do something along these lines though as well? Had a look and it looks as though there is a plug-in (Media Transcoder) that will use MPlayer/MEncoder to rip your DVDs. Edit: There is another plug-in here but i haven't used either. This one uses DVD Decrypter (different to Fab Decrypter).
