I have to remember I grew up enjoying every square inch of an album cover…
now I started my DVD Movie-to-Digital project it’s so unromantic and dreary.
Insert movie into tray, let handbrake make it an .mkv for 25 minutes, drag file to USB to plug in the back of the TV. Repeat.
At 25 minutes a movie I should be done in 2029.
I started this with a head full of steam: would be nice to get rid of the sheer physical deadweight of boxes of DVDs…less plastic…less clutter…better for environment…etc,
now I have to regularly back up my external SSD full of movies and buy another external SSD/HDD to back it up to.
Will I be happy with this project when it ends? Seems very time and labor intensive.
Hopeless Headcase, Hopeless Headcase, you have no complaint. You are what you are and and you ain’t what you ain’t. So listen up Buster and listen up good, stop wishing for bad luck and knocking on wood.
Signed,
Dear Abby. {No way was I passing up that opportunity}.
More seriously, while creating copies in a format that is more convenient to play is fine (if tedious), I think getting rid of the physical copies would be a mistake. That’s what I did with my music CDs - 95% of the time I listen to the copies on my MP3 player, but look on the CDs as my backups.
I would not look to get rid of them. Digital Media can be lost and its really nice to have that physical copy to rip from while preserving the disk as much as possible for as long as possible. This also helps keep the cost down of having to have 2/3 digital copies just to make sure you don’t loose them.
25 minutes is fairly quick. It normally takes me about 2 hours or so to rip to mkv format @1920x1080 (over scaling)(h265 i think is the codec) Now I do that on a laptop that I can just let do it’s thing and it doesn’t tie down my daily.
You also have the option of simply backing up the DVD as is, retaining the DVD structure. This is playable on PC, but you’d have to test it on a USB drive to see if it’s playable in your TV from a USB.
There are also tools like mkvmerge (part of mkvtoolnix-cli) that can concatenate the main feature of a DVD into a single MKV file.
Both of these options retain the existing codec, or in the case of mkvmerge, you might be able to specify an output codec (but I’ve not tried that). The advantage there is nothing is lost to re-compression, in terms of both time and quality. The downside is, the files retain their largeness.
Once upon a time, when storage was small and expensive, I used Handbrake. Once storage became cheap and large, I just rip with makemkv and be done with it. Eight years ago I bought the lifetime license and have been using it ever since. I still think $50 is a screaming deal. But if money is tight, each month there’s a new, free temporary license on their forum.
I have some coming in on Wednesday so I’ll correct this if I’m wrong, but it if memory serves, I can rip a Blu-Ray at about 1GB per minute from an external 4K-BD reader. (I borked my SATA internal one moving it from PC to PC. Stupid big fingers and tiny connectors…)
Has the same advantages and downsides as @Bink has,
And when ripping Blu-Rays, the resulting MKVs can be 35-40GB. Still, you can fit plenty on an 18TB HD in an external housing, which is what I have hooked up to my TV.
I keep some faves (mainly concert videos) on the 8TB SSD on my PC, but everything is on the 18TB external, and I keep the originals for back-up/posterity.
I can understand the temptation to put them on SSD all the way around, but especially on the TV where USB 3.0 speed is the limitation, old-fashioned spinning rust has more speed than the interface, and is far, far cheaper–especially these days.
FWIW, quality-wise, I find my Sony region-free 4K BD player upscales best from 1080p to 2160p, followed by my TV from the USB drive. A distant third is my PC over HDMI 2.0.
so you are telling me this app drags the whole VOB mess here to USB and it’s playable like this with no launcher? I wonder what I would see on the USB menu when I opened this folder on the big screen to play?
Or this app renders/formats the cluttered folder into something playable.
The first option, dvdbackup, retains that clutter and the DVD menu system. I’ve been able to play this on PC using VLC, “Play DVD” option and pointing it to that folder. I’m not sure how your TV might regard it, that’d need testing.
The second option, mkvmerge (part of mkvtoolnix-cli), reduces that clutter by concatenating it to a single MKV file. You’d lose that proper menu structure in the process, and would likely only want to do this if you’re extracting just the main feature.
the older I get I don’t care about the dated sneak previews or star interviews or making of ‘featurettes’.. Grown comfortable with just the movie. I never thought I would say that
I will try this. Right click Payback’s properties tab shows the all the cutter clocking in at 4.7GB. That’s livable for a single movie. Thanks for the ideas
for knowing John Prine by heart 
.
