Saving DVD's onto my iMac/MBP

Gilbert89 · 24 Jun 2011 at 20:26

Hello,

Would just like to ask for some advise and guidance to transferring DVDS and storing them on my MAC's so I can easily select and watch various film titles.
I have never messed around with saving things to my hard disks Ive always been a guy with minimal on his computer but time to utilise that 1TB storage I have...

How would I do this?
What programme would you recommend?
What quality loss am I going to expect?

Thanks guys, would be great to hear your views!

AbsenceJam · 24 Jun 2011 at 22:57

I'd suggest using MakeMKV, there is no quality loss at it just puts the video/audio/subs you want into the more convenient MKV container. Re-encoding can take hours on top of the ripping time and hard drives are so cheap. On a 1TB disk you could get around 150 DVD's.

Gilbert89 · 24 Jun 2011 at 23:59

Thanks for your suggestion, Ive installed MakeMKV .. allowed the software to gather all the titles of stepbrothers in the end 28 chapters 4.5gig and I am now saving it (with is re-encoding) i presume? on my imac with a estimated time of 1 hour.. but if it works correctly, good quality etc.. id be happy to spend some time making my machine have a large title list of dvds! thanks again

Slogan · 25 Jun 2011 at 00:14

If you're not looking to put them into iTunes, MakeMKV is hard to beat.

AbsenceJam · 25 Jun 2011 at 03:02

Gilbert89 said:
Thanks for your suggestion, Ive installed MakeMKV .. allowed the software to gather all the titles of stepbrothers in the end 28 chapters 4.5gig and I am now saving it (with is re-encoding) i presume? on my imac with a estimated time of 1 hour.. but if it works correctly, good quality etc.. id be happy to spend some time making my machine have a large title list of dvds! thanks again

It doesn't re-encode, it remuxes which means to change the container that the various streams are in. So the quality doesn't change at all. It's just much more convenient to have a single file rather than an ISO or VIDEO_TS folder and you save space by not having menus and extras unless you want the latter.

Gilbert89 · 25 Jun 2011 at 08:49

The only two issues I have had is it took a really long time now I left it on whilst i went to sleep is this normal? although my system is hardly under stress so it can run in the back ground no problem what so ever.. and also it finished and said 3 chapters had failed now do they have a tendency to fail or is it very rare?

CrispyXUK · 25 Jun 2011 at 10:01

I use Handbrake to rip and encode in mp4 and subler to tag them.

iraiguana · 25 Jun 2011 at 10:48

It will take a long time yes, I am surprised it failed.

I have used handbrake for encoding things, so it may do more/less than you are after. It takes a very long time though.

Gilbert89 · 25 Jun 2011 at 11:33

I see, so ultimately there is no quicker way to do this process? .. Me too especially since the Mac was untouched 90 percent of the time whilst it was doing its thing now I know this shouldn't or wouldn't make any difference at all.. but still! I would like to think that'd be in my favour!

When using handbrake.. do you use itunes to view the movies? also rather than me google this and more or less be over complicate things.. what are the basic steps to rip the dvds on handbrake? as it worked on my MBP but it was poor quality, I got various coloured tracking lines appearing through my movie.. I havent tried on the IMAC yet.. apart from MakeMKV..

AbsenceJam · 25 Jun 2011 at 11:51

MakeMKV shouldn't take a long time at all. You might want to try copying the DVD's with something else first such as RipIt or Mac The Ripper, even disk utility. Maybe have a look at the MakeMKV forums?

I've not used MakeMKV on a Mac yet myself, only under Windows. It should take 15-20 minutes as all it's doing it reading the disc and writing it to your hard disk in a different container, not at all intensive.

Feek · 25 Jun 2011 at 11:59

Discussion of DVD ripping really isn't allowed at the moment. This may change in the future but technically it's still a no-no.