Greetings from computer ignoramus land. While I do have a newish SONY Vaio laptop with DVD reader and USB3, I am not familiar with computers and have more interesting things to do with my time. If I can't do the task easily, quickly and successfully I would rather hire a professional. I suspect that any high school nerd could do better.

I have 30 DVDs of imovies (format I do not recall), can these be 'ripped' to a 1 Tb external hard drive at an affordable cost? My budget is THB3000 or I will take the heavy and bulky folder to Vietnam or Cambodia and hire someone there, as I expect the cost would be a third.

I would do it myself if it takes 'only' 8 hours, but a computer savvy friend says that it takes 2-3 hours per DVD! My hesitation of hiring a computer expert is mostly the risk of malware. And of course whether or not he/she actually is an expert.

If you have adequate disk space (at least 4GB per DVD), you do not have to rip them; simply copy the entire DVD to a folder on the disk. They then can be played directly from the VIDEO_TS folder. This would take little time compared to the ripping process (but consume much more disk space).