Backing Up DVDs to Digital Format

[connierebel]

I know people have talked about backing up DVD collections in a digital format to the "cloud" or external drives. Is there a good program to use for that, to get a format that's playable on the computer? DVD Decrypter makes an ISO file or something for burning DVDs, but that's not directly playable on the computer. I'm looking into full-time RV-ing, and with space at a premium, I was thinking of just digitizing my DVD collection.

[ERThree]

I use Handbrake. I believe that program forces you to do .mp4 (which is a lossy format), but the quality from the H.264 encoding is high enough that it doesn’t bother me.

[ehbowen]

I use MakeMKV for actually "ripping" the DVD (or, with the one-time optional upgrade, Blu-ray) and then use Handbrake to re-encode if I need to compress it further.

[H4X]

That ISO might play in VLC, you can just drag and drop the ISO into the playlist and you should get full disc menus. A disk image like that is really the only way to have a true back up, with menus and all audio/sub/chapter data.

While VLC is pretty good at DVD menus, it isn't great at playing back interlaced content. If the DVD's MPEG stream has progressive pictures, it will play them back as is at 25p or 30p, and if it detects combs it might try to deinterlace the pictures. It doesn't do the initial interlace required for good field-based processing.

If you're paying for storage space and you just want to archive this DVD image without needing to pull it down often for playback, I've found that xz compression is best for making DVD images slightly smaller losslessly, e.g.

xz -9 -e my_dvd_images.iso

. It's slow, but you generally only need to do it once.

If you don't care about menus and want to play back content frequently, you can definitely look at Handbrake and other deinterlacer+transcoders out there for producing an MP4 or MKV with H.264 or H.265 compression for a significantly smaller file size and easier universal playback.

An alternative to cloud hosting you might consider is Plex, which is cloud-facilitated but self-hosted videos with a lot of nice amenities. With their TV and Playstation apps, you can stream from your desktop, workstation, or file server. This will not work with disc images–just movie files.

Sorry mods for necroing an old thread, but it's still in the top recents for this subforum.