DVD to HDD?

D1craig

D1craig

D1craig

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2,291
does anyone know anyway i can copy all my DVDs to HDD? there are literally over 100 DVDs in this bedroom and they need to be moved really.

there are boxsets of TV series, movies, music concerts (obviously the missus owns them :S).

so some help would be great.
 
I made a start, but its a long process. I used;

makemkv to rip the film from the disc, discs with multiple versions or languages can be tricky (I ripped my toy story blue ray all English etc, but some of the signs/books/text in the actual film are French). can only rip 1 at a time

handbrake to then convert and compress the .mkv file into something smaller and easier to be read by media players (looking at you ps3). You can queue files up and compress overnight

you cant really cheat and do both at the same time, its a slow and annoying process so I have only ripped my favourite films or films that require a disk swap/flip

some films, like my alien quadriligy will not compress properly, so trial and error is involved

good luck
 
i tend to give up if it takes too much time away from my gaming lol.

is it easy for someone who just uses facebook? if so i would get the missus to do it. otherwise id probly not bother.

seems daft that you cant do it any easy way. a jukebox is probly the only way to not have to get up and swap dvds everytime you want to watch one.

i was considering getting myself a NAS box and having all my media put on there but it sounds pretty complicated to get DVDs onto a HDD.
 
I did this about 6 months ago bought my self a nas and copied all my dvd's and Blurays. In total probably about 300:) Took a while but then I had two pc's and a laptop I have not got round to doing my tv shows though.
 
Ripping DVDs (as opposed to Blu-rays) is easy and painless. MakeMKV is simple to use.

Depending on the playback device and whether it can handle DD/DTS natively or not will determine your soundtrack choices. You can rip with both DD (and/or DTS) and Stereo PCM which will retain the choice for you at playback. Similarly you can rip with subtitles to so they can be selected at playback the same as playing the DVD. All of these options are laid out for you after MakeMKV unpacks the disc. It's then a simple matter of ticking the appropriate boxes. This is the same with extras and the trailers before the film. Leave out the tick and each of those is omitted from the final rip.

If there's a tricky part to ripping it's in how the files are stored and named. My playback software of choice is Kodi (previously XBMC), and for that I have each film in its own folder and both the folder and file named in the same way. For example...

> Fury (2014) > Fury (2014).mkv

Kodi is happy if all the film files are in a single folder, or even if it's mixed, but I've found that folders and files works for me. Film files and TV series files must be kept in separate directory folders though. For box sets and TV series the naming convention is a little different. The folder has the series name, then each episode is named for its season (S) and episode (E)...

e.g.

> Dexter >
S01E01, S01E02, S01E03...
S02E01, S02E02, S02E03...
S03E01, S03E02, S03E03...

There's a neat little cheat programme that can rename individual files and also batches of files by searching and matching against known databases. It is called Filebot.

The speed of the process of ripping depends on the power of the computer. Something steam driven such as a Celeron or Athlon will take 15 minutes or so for a DVD rip. An i3 will do it in a couple of minutes.

If you want to process the file to compress it further then Handbrake is your friend. Personally I don't bother using it with DVDs; 200-300 DVDs on a 1TB drive at 1:1 quality is plenty.

Kodi, Filebot and Handbrake are all free to try and to use at the moment so you could give them a whirl to see how you get on.
 
identify a digital file format (and file /folder naming scheme) that is compatible with your endpoints / media server eg. phone, smart tv, roku, laptop, console , etc eg Codec and Profile and container eg AVC h264 4.1. MKV..and also same for audio.

decide whether you need the optical media strucutre/fluff in the digital library eg. navigating the dvd extras etc as a dvd - if you do this this seriously curtail your options.

if your going to use a media server to play content, then test the chosen rip specification thoroughly on all endpoints before ripping all your content to it (video, audio, multiple audio streams, multiple subtitle streams, internal subtitles in eg mkv or external subtitles eg stand alone srt).

hard disk space is not expensive but 1:1 is more unwieldy usually due to size/client compatability.
That said if you invested in space to have 1:1 isos of all disks, and then encode the iso in a second stage....you would be able to rerip more easily when standards/end points changed.

AVC/h264/4.1 is probably a good starting point for widest compatibility (supported by some transocding by media server, good compression)

if i was investing/investigating now, i would be testing HEVC/h265 as the expected successor.
Maybe a bit more transcoding in the short term, but long term an expected superior codec.

You will want the maximum amount of cores/ghz you can get your hands on as reencoding is highly threaded as is transcoding during playback.

with a well specced ripping pc
ripping dvds to iso will be limited by the number of optical drives and the performance of the storage subsystem, i suspect 1 optical drive per core, and 50MB/s disk performance per optical drive (2-3 per sata mechanical disk). Probably want multiple temp drives for ripping performance, and a raid 5+ array for end storage.

encoding ISOs to AVC/HEVC will be cpu bound, cant have enough cpus, all will be fully utilised... Investigate using GPUs/cuda to accelerate encoding, from little investigation ive done, ive concluded its not there yet in terms of quality.
 
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