Ripping DVD's

[GrowleyMonster]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

I don't every watch TV on board (except sometimes when I am alone on board and like the sound of human voices for a change once in a while), but watching movies is a favorite evening activity, especially in the winter time when you don't want to be on deck in the evening.

I have about a million DVD's on board and just bought a whole bunch more on sale. Storage of them is actually starting to be a problem. I wonder if it wouldn't make sense to start ripping them to a hard drive and leaving the actual disks at home?

Does anyone do this? With storage so cheap these days, you could store hundreds of DVDs, I think, on a $180 1.5 terabyte external drive.

I located, downloaded and installed DVDDecrypter, and have successfully ripped a few test DVD's to my laptop hard drive. They end of as a folder full of a bunch of files. I can play them with various movie player programs, but I'm not yet sure that the quality is up to snuff -- it looks like perhaps some video processing step has been skipped.

Does it make sense to reprocess these directories into single MPEG4 or AVI files? Or does that just lead to further reductions of image quality? I have a high def TV on board and would mind the loss of quality. My laptop has an HDMI port and so there is no real reason why I shouldn't be able to achieve high quality.

Anyone else struggle with this? Any tips? Any favorite utilities or programs?

By the way, in case anyone is wondering, all this is perfectly legal if you own the DVD disk and are using the ripped copy only for personal use, as I am.

There are also a lot of movies in the public domain that can be freely copied and even distributed. Just sayin.

My favorite DVD ripper is Handbrake, but I am running Linux. Not sure if there is a Windohs port of this fine app or not. But it is very hassle free and it has never met a DVD yet that it couldn't rip. I have over 1700 movies on hard drive and a bunch of old TV shows as well. Be sure to back up your media HD. It sucks to lose a drive and have to gather up everything and rip it all over again. Two backups are even better. One on the boat, one at home if you have one of those, and one somewhere else. Storage has gotten crazy cheap. They got 4TB USB drives at Best Buy and also 256GB thumb drives pretty cheap which are very handy on a boat, especially if your smartphone is an Android and is OTG capable.

[pragmatist]

We use SSD or memory stick/flash drive - have had computers on board for many years and HDD not only seems to be too vulnerable but takes too much power when we're on anchor or a mooring. In the UK, SSD prices have started to tumble - presumably following on from the falling price of memory sticks. If course there's still a "break point" but then you can always buy a few of the slightly smaller ones. And there is the benefit of powering SSD with USB not external power.

Penny

[Macblaze]

Originally Posted by socaldmax

That's actually not copy protection, that's region code, to prevent the resale of DVDs in different regions of the world. Why? Because the multi billionaire movie studio moguls don't want $5 BD discs from one region of the world to end up competing with the $20 version of the exact same movie they sell in another region of the world. Who says naked greed is dead?

You can (usually) change the region code for most BD players in the menu, but only 4 or 5 times, then it's stuck on that region permanently. Bluray Discs also have copy protection built in, but that was cracked quite a while ago.

Not to quibble but to clarify, region codes are part of what the industry terms "Technical Protection Measures" or more commonly DRM (Digital Right Management); just like traditional copy protection. It's all part of of a grand strategy that is supposed to protect the creators' rights and ability to make money from their creations but more often is simply used to make more money for the distributors (Amazon, Warner Bros etc.). I did a bunch of research about this for an article I wrote and found myself horrified at the opportunism displayed by big media all the while whining about how much digital material is hurting them.

And yes, it's all about greed.

[socaldmax]

Originally Posted by Macblaze

Not to quibble but to clarify, region codes are part of what the industry terms "Technical Protection Measures" or more commonly DRM (Digital Right Management); just like traditional copy protection. It's all part of of a grand strategy that is supposed to protect the creators' rights and ability to make money from their creations but more often is simply used to make more money for the distributors (Amazon, Warner Bros etc.). I did a bunch of research about this for an article I wrote and found myself horrified at the opportunism displayed by big media all the while whining about how much digital material is hurting them.

And yes, it's all about greed.

I said it's not copy protection because it's purpose is simple: to prevent you from playing the disc if your player is not set to the right region. Yes, it's part of the DRM, but it is not preventing you from copying it, it's preventing you from playing it. I didn't want the discussion about copying discs to get confused with the ability to play them.

[Macblaze]

Originally Posted by socaldmax

I didn't want the discussion about copying discs to get confused with the ability to play them.

Absolutely. I just get frustrated with the whole system :-)

Stripping copy protection was still legal here in Canada up until fairly recently, but we've joined the U.S. in this stupid policy and now we're all criminals for trying to back up what we already "own."