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Now DVD format shifting/ripping is becoming legal in the UK advice on doing


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Now DVD format shifting/ripping is becoming legal in the UK advice on doing it to my DVD collection?

Yes I know, ?but everyone does it anyway why have you waited till it was legal you nut Sylar?. Okay let?s get over this point right now point is I am a straight laced person one of them types who hardly ever/ never torrents unless you already have the product key and doesn?t rip my DVDs to the computer. I guess I must be one of them tin foil hat people whom fears black American helicopters invading the UK to send me to the clink! (Joke by the way).

That aside since it?s now officially legal to format shift, and maybe somewhat more importantly we are in the middle of some building work it occurs to me I may as well save a lot of space if I simply ripped my DVD to a portable external drive. What I really want to ask is it as simple as putting the DVD in the drive and copy and pasting the files or do I need to worry about copy protection, and is there any advantage to getting specialist software. Anything I should know, what format should I be using for the files, any point of transcoding them into HD?

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Handbrake is still the go-to program if you're looking to take a DVD and store them on your computer. This is done via compressing the DVD's movie title into a mp4 file. You'll get the benefit of a great looking video at a fraction of the hard drive space of a full DVD. The downside to this is the video, while visually may not look any different from the actual DVD, has been compressed and has therefore lost some of the information originally available. Another downside is that if you wish to make a copy of this video (in case the original is damaged) you'll have to re-author the DVD which will again deteriorate the video image. If you choose this route, you'll need to find software to break the encryption. DVD43 is the program I personally choose. It's free and still works even with some of the newer DVDs coming out. There's also Slysoft's AnyDVD but it'll cost you money.

If space isn't a concern though, your best bet is to do a straight rip of the DVD using a program like DVDFab. This will allow you to store your DVDs as ISO files which will be identical in size and quality. The other benefit of storing them as an ISO file is that, at a later date, if your physical copy becomes damaged you can simply re-burn the ISO on to blank media and have an exact copy of the original. The downside to this method is ISOs can't usually be played on standalone DVD players / TVs.

The choice is really up to you though. Would you rather have a compressed video which takes up less space meaning you can fit more on a hard drive; or, would you rather have a future-proof file that'll allow 1-to-1 disc coping in case the physical copy is damaged.

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You could just use LC ISO Creator - a 14kb download - which rips the entire thing to an iso image. If it's copy-protected you'll need something else to 'unlock' it else it's all you need. Depends on how many/much hdd space you're gonna dedicate to it. Say ~4gb per disc x however many dvds.

Perhaps a fast way overall would be to rip the discs to isos then use Handbrake/other to convert the main movie/whatever else you want on batch.

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Handbrake is still the go-to program if you're looking to take a DVD and store them on your computer. This is done via compressing the DVD's movie title into a mp4 file. You'll get the benefit of a great looking video at a fraction of the hard drive space of a full DVD. The downside to this is the video, while visually may not look any different from the actual DVD, has been compressed and has therefore lost some of the information originally available. Another downside is that if you wish to make a copy of this video (in case the original is damaged) you'll have to re-author the DVD which will again deteriorate the video image. If you choose this route, you'll need to find software to break the encryption. DVD43 is the program I personally choose. It's free and still works even with some of the newer DVDs coming out. There's also Slysoft's AnyDVD but it'll cost you money.

If space isn't a concern though, your best bet is to do a straight rip of the DVD using a program like DVDFab. This will allow you to store your DVDs as ISO files which will be identical in size and quality. The other benefit of storing them as an ISO file is that, at a later date, if your physical copy becomes damaged you can simply re-burn the ISO on to blank media and have an exact copy of the original. The downside to this method is ISOs can't usually be played on standalone DVD players / TVs.

The choice is really up to you though. Would you rather have a compressed video which takes up less space meaning you can fit more on a hard drive; or, would you rather have a future-proof file that'll allow 1-to-1 disc coping in case the physical copy is damaged.

I forgot handbrake can rip dvd to avi for you, just need to get software to remove copy protection like DVDFab or DVD Anywhere. Will take a look at these tonight.

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Yes I should have said I am a DVD/Blu ray freak so will want the best loss less quality I can get, should have been clear. Something I can use in future as well as play from my massive external hdd. Want to be about to put the disks in the attic and forget they exist.

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DVD shrink still has issues with some Sony branded DVDs

nice to see somewhere they are making backups legal again.

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I forgot handbrake can rip dvd to avi for you, just need to get software to remove copy protection like DVDFab or DVD Anywhere. Will take a look at these tonight.

Check out DVD43. It does exactly the same thing, breaking the copy protection encryption, that AnyDVD does without the overhead associated with that program and without the cost. I use it all the time without problem.

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Slightly confused now with all these programs, what do I want if I want to make an exact lossless quality ISO backup of the full DVDs including menus and stuff and be able to play them back on the pc in MPEG4 or something?

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Slightly confused now with all these programs, what do I want if I want to make an exact lossless quality ISO backup of the full DVDs including menus and stuff and be able to play them back on the pc in MPEG4 or something?

Use DVD43 as described above this will dump the complete ISO of the DVD and will be loseless.. also seems to break copy protection as stated.

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Use DVD43 as described above this will dump the complete ISO of the DVD and will be loseless.. also seems to break copy protection as stated.

Cool thanks, anything else I should know anyone, any difference between doing TV shows and Movies?

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Yes I should have said I am a DVD/Blu ray freak so will want the best loss less quality I can get, should have been clear. Something I can use in future as well as play from my massive external hdd. Want to be about to put the disks in the attic and forget they exist.

A straight DVD 1-to-1 rip will run you any where from 4 to 8 gigs depending on the amount of extras - I usually assume 5 GBs on average to be safe. A straight 1-to1 copy of a Bluray will be a lot larger and something that you might want to be aware of. These can range any where from 20 gigs up to 50 gigs for something like The Dark Knight. These Bluray copies can quickly chew through a 2 TB hard drive so for those you might want to invest in a couple more depending on how many you have in your collection.

Ripping DVDs and Blurays will require their own separate software. If you're looking to do Bluray like you've stated you might want to look into AnyDVD HD. While it's not free like the DVD43 program I mentioned before, it's necessary for decrypting the Bluray copy protection.

Another piece of software I'd suggest looking into is MakeMKV. It decrypts, rips and creates a MKV file of your DVD or Bluray in a simple to use, one click process. Best of all, it's free for DVD and will remain free for Bluray until it is out of beta. I've used it in the past and it's quick and virtually fail-proof. MKV files created by MakeMKV are 1-to-1 copies of the original that can be played on wide variety of platforms from PS3 to XBox360 and more. The only downside to using MKV over ISO is that if you wish to make a copy of the original disc, you'll have to reauthor the file back to the DVD / Bluray structure using a separate program. If this isn't a problem, this may be a good place to start.

As for Movies versus TV Shows, it's basically the same regardles but for me, I like having separate files for each episode when it comes to ripping TV shows. This is a problem when it comes to ripping these DVDs into an ISO. This is where I tend to use Handbrake and set it up to rip each episode separately using the H264 video format (.mp4 file).

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I findDVD decrypter works the best. Although discontinued it does a great job of simply ripping content.

Love using that one as well. It's a great program from the same developer of ImgBurn so you know you're getting quality software.

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I use k9copy in Linux and it does the trick for me, especially if you have libdvdcss2 installed. You can rip it to another CD or to a folder on your computer.

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