Maybe the wrong place to ask, so sorry to the mods if thats the case.

I’ve a load of movies on DVD and wonder if its worth converting to mp4 and building a personal media centre to save loading each and every disc. I’ve tried to convert a movie I like to mp4 today using VLC but that crashes. I then downloaded winxdvd ripper - that worked better but cut the movie off after 10 minutes (I fail to see why I should have to pay 40 quid to get more than 10 mins of video).

I also tried an old Ubuntu install on another laptop and Handbrake and VLC there but got no video at all.

Is there any app/program that is open source/actually free where I can just drop in my DVD and create an easy mp4 file to be viewed via my media player/TV?

Thanks in advance

  • GraniteM@lemmy.worldEnglish
    18·
    1 year ago

    I use a two-step process of MakeMKV to do the initial rip and then Handbrake to convert to a more reasonably sized video file. Maybe there are more efficient options, but this one works for me.

    • onebonestone@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      MakeMKV is the way to go. If you have enough space, just rip the streams as direct copy without re-encoding. This way you can encode later if needed with the best codec available at that time.

      • CmdrShepard@lemmy.oneEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        It rips the disks 1:1 into MKV format. Honestly, you could probably leave it there and skip the long Handbrake conversion. DVDs are only around 5GB of files.

        Also when installing MakeMKV be sure to Google for the free product key from the developers.

      • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.deEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Yes, it works with all protected discs I tried. It’s freeware and you only have to pay for Blu-ray support. A small issue is that it will never allow audio-only or subtitle-only MKVs, which would speed up the process of acquiring rare dubs & subs where HD video is available from elsewhere.

    • paultimate14@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’ve been doing exactly this the past couple of weeks.

      Also I’ve set up a JellyFin server to be able to access my backups. It takes so e tinkering with the folder structure and file names, but once I figured it out it does a pretty good job of scraping metadata. And it saves on the wear-and-tear on my optical drives only having to read each disc once.