Watch digital copies of your DVDs anywhere with the help of VUDU and Walmart

I almost never buy DVDs any more. It’s too easy to rent a movie from Redbox or stream a movie over Netflix or Amazon Instant Video. But I still have a giant collection of DVDs that I bought over the past 20 or so years gathering dust in a cabinet in my family room.

Which is why when I heard about VUDU’s Disc to Digital program it caught my attention. Here’s how it works. You take your physical DVDs to the photo department at your local Walmart and ask them to place a digital copy of your movies into your VUDU account (which you can create for free).

Once Walmart is done doing their thing, you can access your movies online pretty much anywhere. You can access them from any Internet-enabled appliance (like a Blu-ray player) with the Vudu app, or on your phone or tablet, again with the appropriate app.

In other words, you now have digital copies of your movies in the cloud. Pretty cool.

Some drawbacks

Of course, there are a few minor drawbacks to this. For starters, Walmart doesn’t do this for free. Each DVD they put in your VUDU account will set you back $2.00 (for a DVD you already paid for). For an extra $3.00 (total $5.00) they will place the high definition version of your movie in your VUDU account regardless of whether your original DVD is high definition or not.

Walmart will also create an imprint on the inner ring of your DVD. This may bug some people but it is a necessary evil to prevent you from passing your DVD around to your friends so they can illegally put the same movie into their account.

And finally, not every DVD you own will be eligible to be placed in your VUDU account. I guess they don’t have all of the licensing to do every movie.

So it’s really a matter of whether or not it is worth a couple more dollars per DVD to have your movies put in the cloud where you can access them digitally anywhere, any time. For me, it’s worth it if for no other reason that to know I can digitally carry my movie collection with me wherever I go (kind of like the iPod did for our CD collection).

Proof it works

And if you’re wondering, I did put this process to the test. I took two of my DVDs into my local Walmart and the entire process was completed without a hitch. As time goes by, I may continue to place the rest of my DVD collection in my VUDU account to eventually phase out my DVDs completely.

What about you? Is it worth the $2.00 ($5.00 for high definition) to convert your DVD collection to the cloud? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think.