I’ve got about 200 or more movie DVD’s and was wondering if ffmpeg or any software will allow transfer and storage of the content to a SSD so they can be played by a ‘SmartTV’ via USB connection in back of the TV? DVD’s and CD’s have been on their way out and I think an alternative should be possible to save all of these ‘purchased’ movies. Also are their encryption codes on the Actual DVD’s that prevent them from being copied? Just wondering. . . . .seems now to have been a big waste of money. I guess ‘streaming’ is now in the vogue but who wants to pay to see things you’ve purchased? Any Idea’s options or software that would help me accomplish this would be helpful. I’m not looking to ‘Pirate’ anything other than archive what I own which may become totally obsolete down the road.
Thanks for the help. . . . I’m amazed. . . I downloaded makekv from AUR and I also have handbrake. I did one DVD which and was able to use handbrake to make it 1080i 30fpm for my TV and it was a total of 1-gig for the whole movie. At this rate I might be able to put 250 movies on a 256 gig thumbdrive for storage. It worked beautifully on the TV with sound. Terrific. . . technology. I initially made an iso file from the DVD with makekv and then used the iso file in Handbrake converting it to 1080i 30fpm. Maybe it all could have been done with just handbrake, I don’t know . . . I’ll have to give handbrake a whirl by itself.
Handbrake is awesome. I have a Linux satellite TV box on which I have recorded some movies in .ts format. To reduce them to 1-2GB I use fast1080p30. Of course it also works with DVD or BlueRay’s.
A lot of people recommend Handbrake here, but think about your end goal.
You want to rip 200+ DVDs. Rip them with MakeMKV. The best tool for the job, use default settings which apply to all or most of your collection.
Maximum resolution of DVDs is 720x480 (NTSC) or 702x576 (PAL). No need to use more than that. The DVD has 4.7 GB capacity, 200 of them use up just 1 TB.
It’s up to you if you stop at this step or convert from the ancient mpeg2 format on disk to a smaller, better one, which has a slight degradation because every reencoding loses information. Most people now just keep the original rip (remux).
Reencoding opens up a can of worms, though. You need to IVTC (inverse telecine) to get rid of the interlaced video and make it progressive, otherwise the quality loss is significant.
Here’s a discussion about it. I would stay away from this until you know exactly what you are doing, and are prepared to waste countless hours tweaking the process.
If you still want to try it, a good start for NTSC DVDs (North America) would be ffmpeg -i "makemkv_output_video.mkv" -map 0 -map_metadata 0 -vf bwdif=mode=0,unsharp=lx=5:ly=5:la=0.5:cx=5:cy=5:ca=0.0 -c:v libx265 -crf 24 -preset veryslow -c:a libopus -scodec copy "video_opusHEVC.mkv"
The first file is the output from MakeMKV.
Please let me know about the results. My last time dabbling with this was years ago, I hope this stuff still works.
Thanks for the info. . . .we’ll see where all this takes me. . . 200+ DVD’s is a lot of work and time. I hope I have the patience to do all of this. . . . time will tell.
Just a little story: At one time, I decided to go fully digital and rip all my old LP records. Took me literally weeks. I think I did listen to maybe 10% of it, and what I did listen to was not my taste anymore.
So, think twice before you take on such a project. Then again, when you have some gems you can’t find anymore, it’s worth it.
Your right. . . .music is universal. . . movies on the the hand. . . are a lot of the same old crap. . . cars chases, shoot em up, good-guy vs bad guy. . . . they seem to lack any new originality in thought and message, the world of escape and make believe goes only so far for our limited brains. . . . . music is different . . . it conveys feelings, emotions, and alters state of mind.
But there’s also the point that you bought these DVDs once and unlike digital, in cloud, media, you actually own it and can take it with you no matter which hardware or OS you use. If you make a switch from let’s say Apple to Linux, you have to wait and see if the content you bought in the past is still yours.
(This actually happened to me when I switched from Mac to Linux, all of a sudden all the albums I bought back then on iTunes weren’t mine anymore.)
