Is there a Legal way to digitize Physical media? (1 Viewer)

[John*Wells]

In other words, suppose I want to take all 14 seasons of the original Dallas series and transfer them to Hard drives. That way , I can avoid DVD rot.

I have all 14 seasons on DVD but I also have been purchasing them via I tunes. I know it may sound silly. But the way things are who knows what the state of technology will be a year from now

 

[jcroy]

Not officially legal.

With that being said, nobody is going to enforce it unless you're into "sharing" such files on your own personal website and/or torrents.

If these ripped dvd files are on your own hard drive and not accessible via search engines nor any torrents, then nothing much is going to happen.

 

[John*Wells]

Not officially legal.

With that being said, nobody is going to enforce it unless you're into "sharing" such files on your own personal website and/or torrents.

If these ripped dvd files are on your own hard drive and not accessible via search engines nor any torrents, then nothing much is going to happen.

Would it be cost or space prohibitive ?

In other words, would I need 100 hard drives to accomplish this?

 

[DaveF]

In other words, suppose I want to take all 14 seasons of the original Dallas series and transfer them to Hard drives. That way , I can avoid DVD rot.

I have all 14 seasons on DVD but I also have been purchasing them via I tunes. I know it may sound silly. But the way things are who knows what the state of technology will be a year from now

Ripping DVDs is easily done. You can find my HTPC thread in this forum. There's a big thread in the Apple forum if you use a Mac. There are vast resources on the web for ripping discs.

The simplest way for most people is to download MakeMKV and use it to rip your discs. You can buy a 8TB, 10TB or 12TB external drive from BestBuy right now for good prices (about $18/TB).

That said, ripping TV series is much more tedious than movies, if only because you're dealing with about 20 episodes per season, so about 160 individual files to rip, rename, and deal with. It's literally about as much effort as ripping 160 movies. Rip a disc or two and you'll quickly know if this is a hobby / endeavor you care to spend your time on.

 

[jcroy]

Would it be cost or space prohibitive ?

In other words, would I need 100 hard drives to accomplish this?

It can fit onto a 2.5 terabyte sized external hard drive, with plenty of space to spare.

IIRC, the original Dallas dvd releases would add up to slightly over 100 flipper sides. As a maximum sized case, each flipper side in principle would be around 8.5 gigabytes per flipper side. So even in this maximal case, it would be around 850-900 gigabytes in total for all the discs' isos ripped to a hard drive.

 

[jcroy]

I agree with dave.

If you don't have the patience for ripping 100+ flipper sides, then you're better off just watching the episodes on a streaming service.

In my exprience, it takes around 11 minutes to rip each flipper side. It is very time consuming and just as boring as "watching paint dry".

 

[jcroy]

The simplest way for most people is to download MakeMKV and use it to rip your discs. You can buy a 8TB, 10TB or 12TB external drive from BestBuy right now for good prices (about $18/TB).

Makemkv is easy to figure out and if you don't care about having the original dvd menus.

For whatever reasons if you still want the original dvd disc menus, then you'll need to use a different program such as the original DVD Decrypter and others. (The original dvd decrypter program stopped all development in 2005, due to legal threats. Though it is still fine for 98+ % of dvd discs released over the past 20+ years).

 

[jcroy]

You can buy a 8TB, 10TB or 12TB external drive from BestBuy right now for good prices (about $18/TB).

Also nowadays with terabytes+ capacity hard drives for a relatively low price, I would not even bother anymore with "compressing" video files ripped from dvd (or bluray) discs.

Compressing video would have made sense back in the 2000s decade with programs like dvdshrink, when hard drive capacities were not as large. (My old desktop computer from the early->mid 2000s, only had a hard drive that was less than 500 gigabytes).

(These days I don't even bother compressing my audio cd rips to mp3).

 

[DaveF]

Storage is cheap. Don’t transcode.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Storage is cheap. Don’t transcode.

Even if it wasn’t dirt cheap - people left with large physical media libraries in 2020, who are still passionate about physical media, for the most part care about discs because of perceived quality improvements. If you transcode, you throw all of that away. And if you’re gonna throw away the extra quality, might as well save yourself the time and hassle and expense and just buy the streaming version.

 

[KPmusmag]

A few years ago, I had my family's home movies (8mm) digitized and I received the finished product on a DVD. My backup solution was to create an image file; I have kept the image file so that if the DVD fails, I can easily make a replacement. I would think that would be the easiest thing to do, as creating an image file is easier than transcoding a whole lot of separate episodes, plus you have the original DVD quality. You could continue watching your original DVDs and if a disc fails, burn a replacement from the image. And hard drives can fail, too, probably more often than DVDs, so I have my home movie image on 2 separate drives for redundancy.

 

[John Dirk]

The simplest way for most people is to download MakeMKV and use it to rip your discs. You can buy a 8TB, 10TB or 12TB external drive from BestBuy right now for good prices (about $18/TB).

I've personally never used MakeMKV but I doubt it could be simpler than CloneDVD by Elaborate Bytes. It produces functionally identical copies with no fuss at all. Copy-protected discs require something like AnyDVD [by spinoff company Redfox] before they can be successfully cloned. As @jcroy points out, this is not technically legal but I personally draw the line at studios telling me I can't create backups of my own collection.

 

[DaveF]

I've personally never used MakeMKV but I doubt it could be simpler than CloneDVD by Elaborate Bytes. It produces functionally identical copies with no fuss at all. Copy-protected discs require something like AnyDVD [by spinoff company Redfox] before they can be successfully cloned. As @jcroy points out, this is not technically legal but I personally draw the line at studios telling me I can't create backups of my own collection.

MakeMKV is free. It doesn’t require AnyDVD for anything. I’ve found that for most people, a $50 purchase is a major impediment making Clonedvd not “simple”. If I were to recommend paid software, I’d go with AnyDVD HD which does dvd, blu, and uhd for ripping and MakeMKV for demuxing.(that’s my approach)

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Also nowadays with terabytes+ capacity hard drives for a relatively low price, I would not even bother anymore with "compressing" video files ripped from dvd (or bluray) discs.

Compressing video would have made sense back in the 2000s decade with programs like dvdshrink, when hard drive capacities were not as large. (My old desktop computer from the early->mid 2000s, only had a hard drive that was less than 500 gigabytes).

(These days I don't even bother compressing my audio cd rips to mp3).

Hmmm... I have somewhere around 1700 BD titles according to my DVD Profiler DB (and probably more actual discs than that due to some boxsets... although not too many since every movie should already be counted, but not the discs for select handful or so of "premium" TV series seasons). Let's say I have 1800 BD discs. Assuming they avg 40GB/disc, that'd need 72TB of storage. I also have around 150 4K discs. Assuming they avg say 75GB each, that'd need another ~11TB.

Throw in some extra space for additional disc purchases, and I'm easily upto 100TB w/ likely additional need in not too distant future...

I could probably get a decent RAID NAS setup for that w/ maybe 8x 12TB WD Red HDDs (and possibility for expansion) for $940 + 8x $330 = ~$3.6K:

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That (while employing a modest degree of fault tolerance like RAID 5) would probably only cover all current discs w/out extra space to spare.

Probably too costly ($$$ plus time/effort) to bother me thinks...

_Man_

 

[jcroy]

My intention is not to have everything I have available on my hard drives. Most of the stuff on my hard drives, are primarily tv shows ripped from dvds. (Not many blurays).

My primary mode of "viewing" is playing one episode after another in the background when I'm at home. Easier to do this uninterrupted on the computer, than swapping out discs every four episodes.

Occasionally I do this with movie franchises I have playing in the background when I'm at home, such as: Resident Evil, Friday the 13th, Star Wars, etc ....


On the other hand if I'm willing to devote my full attention to watching some movies (or tv show) from beginning to end on bluray, then I will just play the actual bluray discs on my standalone bluray player. (This a rarity for me these days). Most movies have very little to no rewatch value for me.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

My intention is not to have everything I have available on my hard drives. Most of the stuff on my hard drives, are primarily tv shows ripped from dvds. (Not many blurays).

My primary mode of "viewing" is playing one episode after another in the background when I'm at home. Easier to do this uninterrupted on the computer, than swapping out discs every four episodes.

Occasionally I do this with movie franchises I have playing in the background when I'm at home, such as: Resident Evil, Friday the 13th, Star Wars, etc ....


On the other hand if I'm willing to devote my full attention to watching some movies (or tv show) from beginning to end on bluray, then I will just play the actual bluray discs on my standalone bluray player. (This a rarity for me these days). Most movies have very little to no rewatch value for me.

That makes good sense. I can certainly see myself doing something like that if I was in your shoes.

_Man_

 

[jcroy]

As an example where I didn't bother ripping the dvd/bluray discs to the computer, was The Clone Wars cartoon.

Basically every time I want to watch The Clone Wars, I usually devote my full attention to watching it from start to finish. This is not the type of show that I would really watch/play in the background when I'm at home doing other things (such as netsurfing, etc ...).

 

[John Dirk]

Hmmm... I have somewhere around 1700 BD titles according to my DVD Profiler DB (and probably more actual discs than that due to some boxsets... although not too many since every movie should already be counted, but not the discs for select handful or so of "premium" TV series seasons). Let's say I have 1800 BD discs. Assuming they avg 40GB/disc, that'd need 72TB of storage. I also have around 150 4K discs. Assuming they avg say 75GB each, that'd need another ~11TB.

Throw in some extra space for additional disc purchases, and I'm easily upto 100TB w/ likely additional need in not too distant future...

I could probably get a decent RAID NAS setup for that w/ maybe 8x 12TB WD Red HDDs (and possibility for expansion) for $940 + 8x $330 = ~$3.6K:

Apple MacBook Pro | Macbook Pro | B&H Photo Video

Shop B&H for special deals on MacBook Pro like 15.4" MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, 15.4" MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and 15.4" MacBook Pro with Touch Bar.

www.bhphotovideo.com

That (while employing a modest degree of fault tolerance like RAID 5) would probably only cover all current discs w/out extra space to spare.

Probably too costly ($$$ plus time/effort) to bother me thinks...

_Man_

Not to mention the time commitment. I have maybe a 3rd of what you have and it took me about 3 weeks to rip about half of my collection.

 

[John Dirk]

MakeMKV is free. It doesn’t require AnyDVD for anything.

 

[DaveF]

Hmmm... I have somewhere around 1700 BD titles according to my DVD Profiler DB (and probably more actual discs than that due to some boxsets... although not too many since every movie should already be counted, but not the discs for select handful or so of "premium" TV series seasons). Let's say I have 1800 BD discs. Assuming they avg 40GB/disc, that'd need 72TB of storage. I also have around 150 4K discs. Assuming they avg say 75GB each, that'd need another ~11TB.

Throw in some extra space for additional disc purchases, and I'm easily upto 100TB w/ likely additional need in not too distant future...

I could probably get a decent RAID NAS setup for that w/ maybe 8x 12TB WD Red HDDs (and possibility for expansion) for $940 + 8x $330 = ~$3.6K:

Apple MacBook Pro | Macbook Pro | B&H Photo Video

Shop B&H for special deals on MacBook Pro like 15.4" MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, 15.4" MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and 15.4" MacBook Pro with Touch Bar.

www.bhphotovideo.com

That (while employing a modest degree of fault tolerance like RAID 5) would probably only cover all current discs w/out extra space to spare.

Probably too costly ($$$ plus time/effort) to bother me thinks...

_Man_

Setting aside the personal time of the project: if you only care about the main feature, the storage requirement will be half to two-thirds what you calculate: about 25GB per blu-ray and 50GB per UHD. That would be 50TB to 75TB.

If you want to consider it, the hardest decision is the NAS enclosure or DIY approach. That's the biggest one time expense. After that, you can buy a 12TB drive, and rip discs until it's getting full. Then buy another disc or two. It would take you months to years to do all your discs, chipping away it, so the drive purchases would be spread out accordingly.

The downside is going in on a thousand dollar 8-bay enclosure intending to build your own personal Netflix, and losing interest in six months, and have 12TB of movies on a NAS that cost you $1300.