Ripping DVDs...worth the effort?

[GT03ROB]

Reading up it seems to be bit of a palaver & I'm wondering if its even worth it

I guess in an ideal world I'd like them stored on something & then be accessible from smart TVs in the house.

I'm no great shakes the IT side of things so anything that involves needing multiple pieces of software & configurations seems too difficult. May just be easier to keep the DVDs & watch via player!

[deckster]

GT03ROB said:

Reading up it seems to be bit of a palaver & I'm wondering if its even worth it

I guess in an ideal world I'd like them stored on something & then be accessible from smart TVs in the house.

I'm no great shakes the IT side of things so anything that involves needing multiple pieces of software & configurations seems too difficult. May just be easier to keep the DVDs & watch via player!

I did this about a decade ago. It was a complete ballache and took ages. If you aren't IT savvy then be prepared for a very steep learning curve. You will definitely need multiple pieces of software, none of which wants to work with each other. It was however worthwhile, for a few years.

These days we just watch Netflix and Disney+ and the old DVD collection doesn't get a look-in.

[K50 DEL]

GT03ROB said:

Reading up it seems to be bit of a palaver & I'm wondering if its even worth it

I guess in an ideal world I'd like them stored on something & then be accessible from smart TVs in the house.

I'm no great shakes the IT side of things so anything that involves needing multiple pieces of software & configurations seems too difficult. May just be easier to keep the DVDs & watch via player!

I'm in the process of doing the same thing at the moment and it certainly isn't easy.
Even more so if you want to keep access to the special features, subtitles etc that the DVD / Blu-Ray will have on it.

I'm ripping to a NAS (large hard drive) and using a free piece of software called Plex (available as an app on smart TVs) to watch through.

Whilst the visual interface is decent enough, the ripping side of things could definitely be more user friendly, there's a gap in the market for some clever person to write a piece of software that simply transfers the entirety of the disc onto the NAS

[ThunderSpook]

I did all mine many years ago. Bought a copy of DVDFab and it does it all in one go.

I then use Plex to stream everything.

[Road2Ruin]

K50 DEL said:

GT03ROB said:

Reading up it seems to be bit of a palaver & I'm wondering if its even worth it

I guess in an ideal world I'd like them stored on something & then be accessible from smart TVs in the house.

I'm no great shakes the IT side of things so anything that involves needing multiple pieces of software & configurations seems too difficult. May just be easier to keep the DVDs & watch via player!

I'm in the process of doing the same thing at the moment and it certainly isn't easy.
Even more so if you want to keep access to the special features, subtitles etc that the DVD / Blu-Ray will have on it.

I'm ripping to a NAS (large hard drive) and using a free piece of software called Plex (available as an app on smart TVs) to watch through.

Whilst the visual interface is decent enough, the ripping side of things could definitely be more user friendly, there's a gap in the market for some clever person to write a piece of software that simply transfers the entirety of the disc onto the NAS

There's not a gap in the market as many pieces of software do it already. The old fashioned way used to be to rip it as an ISO and then the player thinks it's still a disc.

[K50 DEL]

Road2Ruin said:

K50 DEL said:

GT03ROB said:

Reading up it seems to be bit of a palaver & I'm wondering if its even worth it

I guess in an ideal world I'd like them stored on something & then be accessible from smart TVs in the house.

I'm no great shakes the IT side of things so anything that involves needing multiple pieces of software & configurations seems too difficult. May just be easier to keep the DVDs & watch via player!

I'm in the process of doing the same thing at the moment and it certainly isn't easy.
Even more so if you want to keep access to the special features, subtitles etc that the DVD / Blu-Ray will have on it.

I'm ripping to a NAS (large hard drive) and using a free piece of software called Plex (available as an app on smart TVs) to watch through.

Whilst the visual interface is decent enough, the ripping side of things could definitely be more user friendly, there's a gap in the market for some clever person to write a piece of software that simply transfers the entirety of the disc onto the NAS

There's not a gap in the market as many pieces of software do it already. The old fashioned way used to be to rip it as an ISO and then the player thinks it's still a disc.

Unfortunately Plex doesn't support ISO files so using those was not an option for me, I'd be interested to hear of the software packages you mention though as I haven't found one that will do everything... as another poster notes above it all seems to be multiple bits of software that won't work together

[deckster]

K50 DEL said:

Unfortunately Plex doesn't support ISO files so using those was not an option for me, I'd be interested to hear of the software packages you mention though as I haven't found one that will do everything... as another poster notes above it all seems to be multiple bits of software that won't work together

I looked at Plex but didn't get along with it. So I ended up with Kodi, which plays ISOs and pretty much everything else you throw at it. But its metadata handling is awful so I used something else to do the scraping. Although the software I used for that appears to be dead with no updates for years now, so I need to find something else. Plus the DVD ripping software was discontinued, so I stopped ripping ISOs and just extracted the video files. But that's not 100% as it's not always easy to bypass the copy protection, so sometimes you need to get creative and find other ways to get the video out.

All of which is why I sort of gave up and now just use Netflix

[bigandclever]

Isn't the answer usually WinX DVD Ripper?

[Captain_Morgan]

The question is once you’ve spent 100’s if not 1000’s of hours ripping, cataloging & storing the dvd’s & blue rays what’s the plan to back them up?

[Alorotom]

If you own the original just download the movie files from a torrent site and bang them into a library referenced by Plex

No hassle of ISOs and a superior interface to Kodi et al

[FunkyGibbon]

Captain_Morgan said:

The question is once you’ve spent 100’s if not 1000’s of hours ripping, cataloging & storing the dvd’s & blue rays what’s the plan to back them up?

Already backed up on nice individual physical media, with a case and everything...

[TEKNOPUG]

Alorotom said:

If you own the original just download the movie files from a torrent site and bang them into a library referenced by Plex

No hassle of ISOs and a superior interface to Kodi et al

This.

[QJumper]

deckster said:

I looked at Plex but didn't get along with it. So I ended up with Kodi, which plays ISOs and pretty much everything else you throw at it. But its metadata handling is awful so I used something else to do the scraping. Although the software I used for that appears to be dead with no updates for years now, so I need to find something else. Plus the DVD ripping software was discontinued, so I stopped ripping ISOs and just extracted the video files. But that's not 100% as it's not always easy to bypass the copy protection, so sometimes you need to get creative and find other ways to get the video out.

All of which is why I sort of gave up and now just use Netflix

I didn't get along with Plex either, and so used Kodi on it's own for a while, but wasn't entirely happy with that. I now use Kodi as just a front end for Emby, which has so far worked perfectly, and Emby also has iOS and Android apps, so I can access my films/music/tv shows when travelling. Emby's actually not too bad on its own, but I find that Kodi works better with my all in one remote.

I also used to rip DVD's but it was such a faff that I gave up and downloaded them all instead.

[eeLee]

Back from the dead, Redfox (named after the old SlySoft logo.

https://redfox.bz/clonedvd.html
https://redfox.bz/clonebd.html

[anonymous-user]

Considering how low resolution DVDs are, why would anybody want to watch them, let alone rip them.

All mine were thrown out years ago, I don't even have a player anymore.

Not sure why anybody would want to watch one on a 4K screen

[mattyprice4004]

Alorotom said:

If you own the original just download the movie files from a torrent site and bang them into a library referenced by Plex

No hassle of ISOs and a superior interface to Kodi et al

Another vote for this.
I did this and didn't even bother with Plex - just put them all on a (massive) USB thumb drive.

[Cloudy147]

K50 DEL said:

Road2Ruin said:

K50 DEL said:

GT03ROB said:

Reading up it seems to be bit of a palaver & I'm wondering if its even worth it

I guess in an ideal world I'd like them stored on something & then be accessible from smart TVs in the house.

I'm no great shakes the IT side of things so anything that involves needing multiple pieces of software & configurations seems too difficult. May just be easier to keep the DVDs & watch via player!

I'm in the process of doing the same thing at the moment and it certainly isn't easy.
Even more so if you want to keep access to the special features, subtitles etc that the DVD / Blu-Ray will have on it.

I'm ripping to a NAS (large hard drive) and using a free piece of software called Plex (available as an app on smart TVs) to watch through.

Whilst the visual interface is decent enough, the ripping side of things could definitely be more user friendly, there's a gap in the market for some clever person to write a piece of software that simply transfers the entirety of the disc onto the NAS

There's not a gap in the market as many pieces of software do it already. The old fashioned way used to be to rip it as an ISO and then the player thinks it's still a disc.

Unfortunately Plex doesn't support ISO files so using those was not an option for me, I'd be interested to hear of the software packages you mention though as I haven't found one that will do everything... as another poster notes above it all seems to be multiple bits of software that won't work together

Back in the day there was a piece of software that did the whole lot. It would rip the disk and convert to mp4 at the size of your choosing and adjust the bitrate to suit the size. It really was a one stop shop and was very good, but it disappeared from the market and I can’t remember what it was called.

So not the most helpful reply really, other than to say this could still exist somewhere because a version of that did used to exist.

[GT03ROB]

I think so far the answers are convincing me its just not worth it

[somouk]

Agree, download better copies and use a proper media server to make it nice to browse. I use a Synology and Synology Video to index them all.

[Funk]

Captain_Morgan said:

The question is once you’ve spent 100’s if not 1000’s of hours ripping, cataloging & storing the dvd’s & blue rays what’s the plan to back them up?

Backblaze unlimited cloud storage for $70/yr.

I'm in the process of seeing just how unlimited it really is...