How do you rip your DVD collection? (I want to know)

[superboyac]

I really want to know how some of you have gone about transferring your DVD's to your hard drives.

I'm trying to figure out the best way to go about ripping my extensive DVD collection.  I'm sick of putting the discs in and out and going through all the menus, etc.  I've never really gone through all the video ripping software and I haven't followed that technology as much as you would think (for a software geek like me).  That being said, here are the questions I am thinking about:

--I know that I can straight up copy the discs as images.  This would be lossless as far as quality goes and you would think the ideal way.  But even with the big drives that we have now (I'm using 1TB drives currently), it can quickly get filled up with movies.  A typical DVD disc is about 8 GB.  So even a 1TB drive will only hold around 100 movies, which is really not that much.  That brings me to compressed ripping.  The movies you can download on the web will be around 700MB to fit on a cd, I'm guessing.  Now we're talking, because we can fit 1000 movies on a 1TB drive now.  I like that.  But how much quality do you lose?  Is it very noticeable?  I know I can answer these myself, but I don't have a big screen HD television yet, so I don't know.  Those 700MB files look fine on my old, curvy-screen TV.

Well, I guess that's my only question right now.  Do I want to compress or not?  I'd like to hear how some of you go about doing this.

The other thing is that Bluray DVD's are even bigger, like over 20GB each.

Of course, there's the SHHHH! option....download pre-ripped movies from the web that I already have.  Why should I rip my own DVD's when people out there who are better than I am have already done so?  Of course, I'm sure not everything I have will be there.  I have a lot of music DVD's (jazz, classical) that i doubt is anywhere on the web.  But i'm not completely opposed to that option.  I've tried ripping DVD's once or twice before, and the whole process is a big pain in the butt.  And it's not just a couple of minutes like with music.  it takes quite a while to rip movies properly.  And a lot of technical stuff going on there, lots of settings, etc.

Anyway, I haven't even talked about the software options yet (on purpose).  That's because i don't know how I'll go about doing this.  Once i get some ideas from you guys, I'll be able to make a decision.  Thanks!

I went through a similar thing years ago for my music collection.  Do I want to use mp3's or FLAC (or other lossless codecs)?  I settled on mp3 because you get the most bang for your buck.  Lossless files are practically 5x the size of a normal mp3 file, and I didn't think my ears could tell that much of a difference, if at all.  But if you ask people, you will get very opinionated responses.  Audiophiles will insist that they can totally hear the difference.  But i don't know, I have pretty good ears and I'm a hardcore music person, but I honestly could not tell the difference.

The other thing i considered was that not all portable players would play the lossless files at the time.  Things are different now, but my collection is already set. 

[Shades]

As the owner of a 1080p monitor I can say that you do see 'artifacts' when a movie is compressed to 700Mbyte...when I watch it full screen. Most of the time these kind of files are created for a setup that uses a 720p monitor/tv/beamer for display.

MilesAhead pointed us to the existence of MakeMKV, a tool that creates .mkv files that will contain all the chapters, subtitles etc. Granted those files are not that much smaller (at least in the cases that I tried), but the quality doesn't suffer. Because of that, the conversion is fast. On my dual core system the conversion takes about two minutes, if the original dvd is in pristine state.

The latest version (at the time of writing) is free to use for dvd, for blu-ray support you need to pay.

When you only like files in .avi container, then there is an interesting piece of software, called: OxelonMedia (and sidekick: OxelonPlugins)
and they should make the conversion a whole lot easier. Oxelon conversion becomes part of the context menu.

Oh yeah, sorry about being too lazy to add links.

[Innuendo]

It all depends on what you want to do, superboyac. If you are just going to be sitting in front of your PC watching movies your choices are wide open. If you are wanting to have a solution that you can watch on your TV then the choices get a lot more limited & you may need to buy a piece of equipment to hook up to your TV. If you are wanting a solution that can be played on anyone's TV & equipment your choices dwindle to very few.

So what's your perceived scope of use? That will let us know what to suggest.

(And on the topic of MP3s vs. FLACs, for the most part I can't tell the difference, but there are certain songs that have complex enough 'sound' that every lossy format exhibits audio artifacts so I went with FLAC myself for the purity. The other reason I went with FLAC was that this is a one-time ripping of my discs. Since FLAC is lossless I can convert to any other format without the loss I'd experience if I were to convert MP3s to a different format.)

[superboyac]

Shoes, thanks.  I remember that thread about makeMKV.  I'll have to go back and read that again.  I don't know much about MKV, but I've heard it's a good format.  The only thing I know about it is that people who like subtitles like mkv for some reason.  i'll have to research that.

Innuendo, I already have a tv hookup to a pc right now (I should have mentioned!).  I did that last year with my old computer.  It's an old 2001 pc and it's amazing how fast it runs on XP with all the extra junk taken off.  Anyway, that's ready to go.  However, i must say that it can't really play HD movies, it can't handle it.  In fact, it can't really handle anything much more than those 700MB compressed files, or things of comporable size/quality.  But I do have an extra laptop and another computer as well, so I'm good there.

No, I don't need something to play on several computers, just mine.  That's all I want, to be able to access my movie collection on the hard drive without looking through all my discs on the shelf/boxes.  I would say I'd like to play these anywhere, but I really don't care.  I've done that before, where I've taken movies to other people's homes and tried to play them through a laptop or something, and it's always a pain to setup.  They don't have the right cables, they don't have the right software, the TV settings are difficult, audio issues, etc.  By the time the movie starts playing, everyone's asleep.  No, this is just for my own use.

[JavaJones]

Keep in mind that most of the 700MB rips were done with the older MPEG4 codecs like Xvid, Divx, etc. h.264 is more efficient and can create higher quality at equivalent file size. Also keep in mind you're not limited to that size if you're just ripping for your own personal needs, so you can decide to go for e.g. 2GB instead, at which size you'll get quality that is virtually indistinguishable from the source DVD, and still save from 2.5 to 6GB (depending on whether it's a single or dual layer movie).

That is for DVD source material mind you; high definition source will require larger file size to maintain source quality, around 8GB seems to work fairly well at up to 1080p, depending on length. But ripping Blu-ray is harder and more error prone right now anyway. And you'd need a blu-ray drive in the computer anyway, which I'm not sure you have.

Anyway if it were me, and I had a big existing DVD collection to rip, I'd go for one of those tools that targets MKV, so you can easily maintain all additional materials, and then hopefully it has some customization in terms of video and audio codecs and bitrates, etc. Ideally it would just have a nice automated system where you can set a quality threshold or even file size (e.g. 2GB as above) and then just tell it to go, and all you have to do is swap out discs and press "Rip" each time. Unfortunately I don't know of specific tools that would be best for this, but I think something along those lines does exist, possibly one of the ones already mentioned...

- Oshyan

[superboyac]

Anyway if it were me, and I had a big existing DVD collection to rip, I'd go for one of those tools that targets MKV, so you can easily maintain all additional materials, and then hopefully it has some customization in terms of video and audio codecs and bitrates, etc. Ideally it would just have a nice automated system where you can set a quality threshold or even file size (e.g. 2GB as above) and then just tell it to go, and all you have to do is swap out discs and press "Rip" each time. Unfortunately I don't know of specific tools that would be best for this, but I think something along those lines does exist, possibly one of the ones already mentioned...

-JavaJones (April 12, 2010, 12:45 PM)

That sounds pretty good to me!  I'm going to try out this makeMKV program.  i guess mkv files allow for all that extra stuff, like menus and chapters?  That would be very helpful.  having one file per dvd is a good idea, and have it retain all the dvd qualities, while removing the annoying bits.  i know images are technically one file also, but images keep all the annoying stuff on it.

[JavaJones]

MKV does allow for pretty much all the features of a DVD - chapters, subtitles, alternate audio tracks, etc.

- Oshyan

[superboyac]

MKV does allow for pretty much all the features of a DVD - chapters, subtitles, alternate audio tracks, etc.

- Oshyan

-JavaJones (April 13, 2010, 12:02 PM)

So it can do all that with one file?  That's pretty cool.  If that's the case, why isn't mkv used more?  It sounds like it can do everything the other containers like avi can do, but more.

[JavaJones]

Yes, it's definitely a better container format than AVI (which is very outdated at this point). I think it's not used more often for the same reason Ogg Theora isn't used more often. Whatever that reason is.

- Oshyan

[superboyac]

Yes, it's definitely a better container format than AVI (which is very outdated at this point). I think it's not used more often for the same reason Ogg Theora isn't used more often. Whatever that reason is.

- Oshyan

-JavaJones (April 13, 2010, 03:35 PM)

So if I read you correctly, it's not used more just because.  Even though mkv is better, more features, can do more, it's just not as widely known and doesn't have the momentum of avi.  OK, that makes sense.  Sounds like I'm going to enjoy mkv, though!

[Innuendo]

Is there any set-top box type device that can play mkv files?