DVD to hard disk conversion

[tutsiwarrior]

I've got about 300 movies on DVD that I need to convert to hard disk files. What is the best software for this purpose using my laptop with an integral DVD drive? About half are 'copy protected'. I need something that has no NTSC/PAL file restrictions.

 

I gotta do something soon as my DVD player is about 10 years old and they are now obsolete.

 

thanks for any help in advance.

[Don Mega]

Its been a few years since Ive ripped any DVD's but I used to use DVDshrink.

 

http://dvdshrink.org/

[happy Joe]

I had same than you. After much reflection, I have destroyed them for the following reasons:

1 Today there are almost all movies for free, available in torrent or direct download.

2 This download will take less time than DVD transfer on hard disk.

3 Formats and qualities are much better and lighter now. For example there are full HD movies in H264 or H265 compression weighing around  1.5 GO.

 

Finally today my stock is always approximately 200 titles that I eliminate after seeing and replace by new ones.

[Peterw42]

Dvdshrink or Handbrake is another. If you have a decent internet connection, you could probably download your 300 movies quicker than ripping them. 

[tutsiwarrior]

yeah...I have downloaded quite a few films and the downloaded collection is almost as big as the DVDs...but I got some nice stuff on DVD like old japanese cinema on Criterion Collection and etc...I even spent USD80 on a copy of Tokyo Story...

 

but I started my DVD collection almost 10 years ago (anybody remember Movies Unlimited?) and now there's a lot more available to download than back then...

 

it is nice when you discover a recent but previously unknown gem on TV,  look for it on the torrents and then have it available on yer laptop in an hour...check out An Education with Carey Mulligan which was a sensation about 6 years ago and I had never heard of it...I fell in love and I don't even like English girls... she set the screen ablaze with her performance but she's never done the same since, unfortunately...

 

thanks fer yer suggestions...

[JSixpack]

DVDFab

Freemake Video Converter

MakeMKV

VSO DVD Converter

 

 

[tutsiwarrior]

to update...I went thru all of my 260 - odd DVDs and copied them to external hard disk using DVD Shrink...however about 14% of that number were damaged , either by humidity or by other mechanical damage to the read surface...and the DVDs have just been sitting onna shelf for the past 7 - 8 years...

 

so, if anyone has some DVDs lying around that they haven't played for awhile I suggest that you inspect them and copy them to storage media before they are ruined...

 

btw, the copies that DVD Shrink produces are typically >4GB...the same films downloaded from the internet are usually 700MB - 2GB...now my film collection including downloaded copies fills 2 x 1TB external drives...gonna havta do some deleting as there are some duplicates, but need to check the quality of the ripped DVD against the downloaded copy first...

 

my own private movie marathon comin' up soon...

 

 

[KittenKong]

25 minutes ago, tutsiwarrior said:

to update...I went thru all of my 260 - odd DVDs and copied them to external hard disk using DVD Shrink...however about 14% of that number were damaged , either by humidity or by other mechanical damage to the read surface...and the DVDs have just been sitting onna shelf for the past 7 - 8 years...

 

CD/DVD rot, or disk rot, is a known phenomenon that seems to affect all disks eventually though at different rates according to how well they are made and how they are stored. So much for manufacturers' promises of media that would last 100 years.

 

Laser devices are fussy and you may find that fitting a different CD/DVD reader/burner in your PC allows you to read some or even all of the ones that you currently cant read.

[sometime]

I had to rip all my DVDs to hard disc because the surface was starting to go, not through use but the humidity go too much, some were only a few months old.

 

Most were genuine from the UK so I used MAKEMKV

Reads DVD and Blu-ray discs

• Reads Blu-ray discs protected with latest versions of AACS and BD+

• Preserves all video and audio tracks, including HD audio

• Preserves chapters information

• Preserves all meta-information (track language, audio type)

• Fast conversion - converts as fast as your drive can read data.

• No additional software is required for conversion or decryption.

• Available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux

• Functionality to open DVD discs is free and will always stay free.

• All features (including Blu-ray decryption and processing) are free during BETA.

The quality is superb, I transfer what I want to watch onto a flash drive & stick it in the TV this saves the life of the hard drive. not one has failed to play, just had to format the flash drive to NTFS

I now have 9TB nearly full

Edited November 9, 2016 by sometime
extra wording

[tutsiwarrior]

yeah...on some of the DVDs that couldn't be read I got a 'region error' (remember the regions 1 - 7?) that couldn't be corrected but they were a small amount which should be replaceable by torrent download as they are relatively 'popular' titles...some of the rejected ones are simply movies that were popular that I had never seen like 'Slumdog Millionaire' which I never intended to watch again anyway...

 

so, no big loss, nothing that would necessitate obtaining a different optical laser device......thank goodness that all of my more esoteric items (old japanese and european cinema) remained intact as they might be hard to replace, they are all on Criterion Collection DVDs which are high quality...

[tutsiwarrior]

I remember during the days of the dinosaurs that I copied about 100 movies from the BBC and from ITV channel 4 onto VHS cassettes...then I got divorced and those cassettes and some books were all that I took with me when I fled the UK afterwards...I tried to junk them but like I said in another thread my thai wife never throws anything away...

 

'but, sweetheart...devices for playing the cassettes haven't been available to buy for over 10 years...'

 

 

[Beachcomber]

'but, sweetheart...devices for playing the cassettes haven't been available to buy for over 10 years...'

 

Who would have thought vinyl record would be making a comeback 

 

You just never know 

[AgentSmith]

I abandoned optical media years ago. I threw away my DVD's in the early 2000s when divx and later xvid became popular formats. When the HD era began I slowly replaced all my AVI files with MKV's and MP4's. Been enjoying that quality ever since and DVD is way below standards now. Some things of the past (such as vinyl records) are amazing but DVD is a 20 year old inferior digital technology that is best forgotten by now.  MPEG-1 video, especially in NTSC format, can really look like a ghost from the past with its dimmed colors and low resolution. Plus the fact that neither PAL nor NTSC are widescreen so movies in letterbox format effectively have an even lower resolution vertically (unless recorded anamorphic but that was a rare find when widescreen tv's themselves were like a needle in a haystack).

 

Of course if you have personal recordings then it's a different story. But in that case you can simply copy the DVD files directly to the harddrive. If you store them in a ISO container file a modern OS like Windows 10 can mount it to a drive letter and access it like a physical drive. If you also keep an off site backup you are certain to keep your valuable video basically forever. If only because harddrives as well as the cloud are infinitely more reliable types of storage than any optical disc.