Hi everyone!
I have around 200 DVD (with movies) that I’d want to backup in order to save them from rotting or physical media disappearance.
My most powerful computer with a DVD drive is a 2012 MacBook Pro upgraded to 16gb of Ram with an SSD running Fedora 42.
If possible, I’d want to keep all the bonuses of the movies, but I could also just backup the movies if keeping the whole disc is too difficult.
My goal would be to keep the original quality.
Also 6-7 discs are already skipping scenes even if the disc shows no damage.
I’ve bought some of these discs 20 years ago with my teenager pocket money so I wouldn’t want to lose them.
Thanks for the help.
As I own these discs and nothing would be illegal in my country, I thought it would be better to post here instead of the piracy community.
Edit: I guess I’ll use Make MKV Beta as it seems to work well and VLC can open the MKV files. Thanks for your help!
accept reality. just like vhs…all those formats die. and no one will ever look at the shit again. your future tv will be bazillion K resolution, have another aspect ratio and so on… and if you really ever want to watch that one movie again there’'ll be better ways and better copies of the movie somewhere. you are wasting energy, polluting the environment and overestimating the value of your past memories.
It might be your reality but it’s clearly not mine.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve rewatched Alien or Terminator.
So yes it’s true that I’m using Netflix more than my DVD’s, but I’ll watch a lot of these movies again for sure.
Also, despite the low resolution, DVD’s now have some kind of charm in their picture quality and it’s perfectly good enough for me.
But, of course, someone who doesn’t enjoy cinema the way I do shouldn’t be going through such a hassle.
You should be able to make a complete backup of a DVD to an iso file using dd.
That would get you an exact copy of the disk with everything on it. And also, while 200 DVDs sounded a lot, it’s “only” 860GB (assuming 4,3GB/disk which I think is the most common for movies), so it’s not stupidly expensive either. Obviously you’ll want a RAID setup and most likely backups for that, so it’s more than just a single 1TB drive, but still quite manageable.
They would probably compress pretty well, I imagine.
Majority of the data (video) is already compressed as MPEG-2 so I’d think it doesn’t compress very well. But if you don’t have enough storage it’s always an option to re-encode video with something more modern and achieve smaller file sizes from that. But that also removes at least DVD menu and other ‘format dependent’ options.
Yeah, but I’m assuming there are many gains to be had if your compression method doesn’t need to be stream decoded for real time playback.
But then would I be able to read them on any computer without burning them?
Yes. You could use vlc or even as an iso file just open them as a virtual drive.
Automatic Ripping Machine can pull the main movie off a disc automatically, but I’m not sure about imaging the full disc. Once it’s set up, you just put a disc in and wait.
dvdbackup with the -M option makes a 1/1 clone of your dvd aswell as decrypts the video. One of the best ways to backup old dvds. Takes alot of storage tho and is cli rather if thats a plus or minus for yah.
you can make an iso, that is a digital replica. the iso can be played with for example vlc.
you can use makemkv, which creates an mkv file out of every video. this allows additional file managing, cause you get a lot of mkv files if the dvd has several bonuses. mkv wont change the encoding, cause its just a container.
as for the skipping…i used to clean up all my nonreadable dvds. just plain old simple soap and luke warm water. cleaned with microfiber cloth.
warner currently has a dvd rot replacment project, but people said you have to jump though too many hoops to make it work. and thats just warner, the other dont even care.
Yeah I miss DVD bonuses like directors commentary, cut scenes, bloopers and alternate scenes.
How would one handle those extra scenes though, in storage as well as in a Jellyfin library?
If you rip the DVD as a movie could you have directors commentary as a audio track?
What about the extras as a season? Or single merged movie with chapters?
Plex handles it like this:
Local extras can be located alongside the main movie file in a directory named for the movie. They’re indicated by using specific naming at the end of the filename. Local inline extras will be detected and used if named and stored as follows: * `Movies/MovieName (Release Date)/Descriptive_Name-Extra_Type.ext` Where `-Extra_Type` is one of: * -behindthescenes * -deleted * -featurette * -interview * -scene * -short * -trailer * -otherhttps://support.plex.tv/articles/local-files-for-trailers-and-extras/
Jellyfin might do the same
Fantastic question
“Handbrake” is quite good at making high quality mkv files, you should be able to Automate a lot of it
You could use
ddto create full disk images. This maintains everything.This should work for -most- DVDs, unless they’re using some unique copy protection.
The following packages are needed: dvdbackup, libdvdcss, cdrtools
To get info on an inserted DVD (and check it can be read): dvdbackup -i /dev/sr0 -I
To rip the DVD to a directory (-M will mirror the disc): dvdbackup -i /dev/sr0 -o /path/to/store/dvd/ -M
And then to write the directory contents to an iso image: mkisofs -dvd-video -udf -o /path/to/save/movie.iso /path/of/ripped/dvd
From there you can archive the iso, mount it for playback, etc. My next step was a combination of MakeMKV and Handbrake to encode the main movie (H.265 MKV 480p30) for storage on a media server.
Replying to say dd is probably the better method for archival, but this works for me in most cases.
I guess I’ll use Make MKV Beta as it seems to work well and VLC can open the MKV files. Thanks for your help!
Look at doom9.net for decryption and ripping DVD’s.
Use handbrake and set it to used the Apple videotoolbox for hardware encoding. Looks good, smaller files, fast and easy. Almost everything encodes properly with this method but there are a small number of titles with interesting encryption that breaks with this method. Almost everything works this way though.
I’d recommend using Make MKV if possible, and then you might use Handbrake to transcode it.
I know you are mostly asking about ripping the media. But I would recommend looking at tiny media manager to pull metadata and organize.
Mini hijack but what software would yall recommend for vhs backups, preferably linux native? I figure need to do this before they start degrading. I have a capture card already, just was wondering the best software. I tried potplayer but didnt love it…id really need software with an auto shutoff so I can play a tape when I go to work or bed and not have 6 hours of blank recorded…
