RealDVD lets you load up your laptop with movies

SAN DIEGO -- You're schlepping the kids on a family trip and will do anything to keep them occupied. For better or worse, many parents stick them in front of a video.

Were it only that easy. The discs the youngsters want to watch are too often lost, scratched or broken; somehow your smallest child hasn't yet distinguished a DVD from a Frisbee. Besides, you are trying to pack light.

This week at the Demo tech conference in San Diego, RealNetworks unveiled a neat solution for just such a family scenario, or for the business traveler who loves movies. It's called RealDVD, and the basic idea is appealing: You can copy, organize and play your DVD movies and TV shows on a laptop while leaving the physical discs at home.

It's similar to when folks first copied music CDs onto their computers.

I've been testing RealDVD for more than a week, and for the most part it measures up to its coming attractions. I did encounter jerky playback issues with a couple of movies.

The software is most useful if you have a big enough hard drive to store the discs' contents, though you can also copy movies onto inexpensive USB thumb drives and attach those to your computer. For now, RealDVD cannot copy high-definition Blu-ray discs, even if you have a Blu-ray burner.

RealDVD copies the entire disc — the movie plus menus, trailers and bonus features. You can watch a movie on the computer while you are copying it, watch another movie during the cloning process, or make a copy while you are doing something else. You'll need a Windows XP or Vista machine.

Disc copying isn't new, of course. As far back as 2003, I reviewed a killer program called DVD X Copy, from Chesterfield, Mo., start-up 321 Studios. Used with a burner on your Windows computer, the controversial $100 program also let you make a flawless "backup" copy of a commercial DVD, whether you owned that disc or merely rented it. Hollywood hollered, and 321 lost in court. It has since closed, but other free disc-copying programs exist on the Web.