How to Import DVD Movies into Windows Movie Maker

Windows Movie Maker is a totally free program that comes with Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Media Center Edition, Windows XP Professional, and Windows Vista (also called Windows DVD Maker). Below are the media formats accepted by Windows Movie Maker:

Video files: .asf, .avi, .wmv
Movie files: MPEG1, .mpeg, .mpg, .mlv, .mp2
Audio files: .wav, .snd, .au, .aif, .aifc, .aiff
Windows media files: .asf, .wm, .wma, .wmv
MP3 format audio: .mp3

To import a DVD clip into Windows Movie Maker, you need to extract the clip from the DVD movie, and then add it to the Windows Movie Maker project. I'd recommend using Clone2Go DVD Ripper to perform the DVD ripping process.

1. Add DVD movies

On the main interface, click "File -> Open DVD..." to import the DVD disc. Or you can click the "Open DVD" button to add the DVD.

If the DVD movie is saved as a folder on your computer, you need to click the "Add Video" button to locate that folder, which is composed of two separate folders: VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS. From the VIDEO_TS folder, select the .vob file to import and then click "OK".

2. Trim the video

You can drag the "Start to trim" and "Stop to trim" buttons to get the certain segment of the DVD movie.

You can also specify the "Start Time" and "Stop time" at the bottom right panel of the interface (under "Profile").

3. Specify the output format

Windows Movie Maker needs external codec to decode mp4, xvid and mpeg2 video. To skip this trouble, please select "Customized AVI Movie(*.avi)" profile and adjust "video codec" to "msmpeg4v2", "video size" to "Original" to get AVI video accepted by Windows Movie Maker.

4. Start to encode

Now you can click the "Start Encode" button to start ripping the DVD clip to Windows Moive Maker AVI format.

Tip: The output video files are easily available by clicking the "Folder" button on the main menu after the ripping/converting process is done.

5. Import the DVD clip to Windows Movie Maker

After you get the output video clip ripped from the DVD movie, now you can begin to import it into your Windows Movie Maker.

Click on "File". Then click on "Import". A window will appear. In the window, navigate to the video clip you extracted from the DVD movie just now. Then double click on the file. You'll see the icon for the file in your Windows Movie Maker "Collections".

Tip: Many users may wonder how they can convert Windows Movie Maker file (*.MSWMM) to other video format. Actually, A *.MSWMM file is not a video file. It is a project file of Movie Maker (more like a record file). You have to open this file in Windows Movie Maker and save the movie to your computer: Go to Movie Tasks bar -> Finish Movie -> Save to my computer. After that you will have a WMV file which can be converted to another video format or burned to DVD.