DVD-to-MPG [HDD] conversion and copy-protection

[BonzaiDuck]

I have a retired friend who spends a hefty portion of his year vacationing in a tour-bus mobile home. He has a HU-U-U-GE collection of movie DVDs, filling an entire wall in his study. And he wants to get these movies converted to an MPG format on a large HDD in an external USB or e-SATA box, so he can just take the external HDD and a laptop with him in the tour-bus, or run this laptop configuration into a port on his tour-bus HDTV.

With the implementation of HDCP and copy-protection schemes, is there any way for him to do this?

 

[Wall Street]

Handbrake can do this. However, there are certain problematic DVDs with unusual copy protection such as Dark Knight that are harder to rip and compress.

 

[bbhaag]

Handbrake cannot open a dvd anymore they took that part out a long time ago. It can shrink the opened dvd file size down to a more acceptable level though.

If you want to open a dvd there are a handful of programs around that can do it but most of them are payware. AnyDvD or DvDFab might be worth looking into.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Handbrake cannot open a dvd anymore they took that part out a long time ago. It can shrink the opened dvd file size down to a more acceptable level though.

If you want to open a dvd there are a handful of programs around that can do it but most of them are payware. AnyDvD or DvDFab might be worth looking into.

Thanks. Just spoke with my friend who has the motor-home HT system. He's become more realistic about the troubles of bringing along piles of jewel-cases, versus the trouble of conversion to achieve the convenience of HDD storage.

 

[KingFatty]

Well you can also let him know that you can maintain the full DVD structure, so that when you "play" the DVD folder that was ripped to the hard drive, it's just like inserting a DVD. You get the same intro menus and everything, no loss in the DVD experience.

But, that will use up more space compared to recoding the DVDs from their native MPEG-2 to something like an x264 mp4 file and losing the menus etc. Some movies will use an entire dual-layer DVD worth of space, whereas other will use just a couple GB. So maybe he wants to keep all the menus etc. and just rip all the DVDs without having to recode them, tell him he might need multiple drives configured in some kind of JBOD or RAID etc.

But that would save a LOT of time, not having to re-code all the video. Just physically ripping a DVD takes about 15 minutes on a 16x DVD reader, keeping all the menus.

Heck, calculate how much space you'd need if you were to re-encode all the videos. Then compare it to how much space it would take to just have the ripped full DVD files. Maybe it would take multiple drives either way, so would be more incentive to just go ahead and skip the recoding and keep all the menu stuff.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Thanks. Just spoke with my friend who has the motor-home HT system. He's become more realistic about the troubles of bringing along piles of jewel-cases, versus the trouble of conversion to achieve the convenience of HDD storage.

My recommendation is for him to buy a binder with the plastic sleeves and bring the DVDs that way. DVDFab can definitely do it, but depending on the number of movies, it can be a significant time investment. I've got 112 movies on my server (ripped from my blu rays and DVDs) and the DVDs took about 20 minutes each with the blu rays taking 1 hr+. This was using DVDFab and converting them using the mkv.h264.audiocopy profile on an i7-2600k over clocked to 4.5 ghz.

Edit: There is another possibility that I'll add on to the poster above. You can rip to ISO format and install DaemonTools on his PC so he can mount them and play them easily (if he doesn't have DVD playback software, he would need that as well). As the previous poster said, this will consume more disk space but will be much faster (10 to 15 minutes per for DVD and 25 to 30 minutes per blu ray). To calculate the space required, assume each DVD is 10 GB. If he has blu rays to rip, assume each is 50 GB.

 

[KingFatty]

Yes, very nice solution appears to be to have both - the binder plastic sleeves with all the source DVDs, *and* the ripped ISO format. Then if the copyright police stop you, you can pull out the binder and show fair use of your physical discs.

Also, note that you can get the menu structure full disc experience in two ways (so far mentioned): doing the ISO exact disc rip, and also the full menu structure copy of the DVD to a folder. The folder method will not require any mounting step or anything, and also will be compatible with things like Windows Media Player where you just see your catalog of DVDs even though you just have a file structure of folders. I haven't tried the ISO method so I don't know if that will present you with the wall of DVD art like the folder method.