My partner’s grandmother has passed and has left a collection of hundreds possibly thousands of DVDs. These range from official releases to pirated and bootleg copies.
What would be the best way to digitize and archive this collection? Is there an external device out there that will let me burn and convert the DVDs? I’d want to possibly upload on archive.org if the copyright expired, store on backblaze or maybe another digital archiving site besides a regular torrent, would appreciate any recs on sites and advice in general. I haven’t gone through these yet but figure the project would be a fun learning experience.
I would not bother archiving the mainstream releases that can already be found on many torrent sites (like, you don’t need to archive Star Wars or Lord of the Rings) and focus on the bootleg disks first. You just need any standard DVD drive, then use Handbreak to rip the disks to a video file. For official releases, many of them have forms of copy protection, but 15 minutes on Google should tell you how to get around any you come across.
Also, for reference, “burning” a DVD is writing data to a disk, so the opposite of what you’re trying to do.
Depends on the version. Some versions of older films that have been remastered can be quite sought after.
MakeMKV can rip the DVDs without touching the contents. I’d suggest either an ISO or more helpfully the contents in folder layout which should be preserved under a top level folder with the name of the disc and at the bottom level .vob files.
You certainly can use Handbrake but it is re-encoding and if you have no experience it’s easy to mess up (among other things de-interlacing doesn’t always work right without tweaking so it’s typically best for archiving to not re-encode DVDs before sharing).
-If- you do chose to use Handbrake (again I wouldn’t recommend it if archiving, it takes skill and there’s a reason why to this day full DVD rips are useful to people who want a copy while someone’s best attempt at an AVI file made 15 years ago looks awful and is considered useless given the low bitrates and old codecs) I’d plead you use software not hardware encoding, choose x264 or x265 (10bit for x265) and use the slow preset at CRF, constant quality 16 and make sure de-interlacing is set right on auto, also pass through the audio in original dolby digital as well as vobsub subtitles. But it really is best to not encode and just copy.
You can share directly to the DHT swarms by just creating your own torrent and eventually people will find it assuming it’s named correctly in the format of <movie name (year)>.
Don’t duplicate other people’s work if you can help it. There are various sites for sharing this type of stuff, I don’t want to get in trouble so won’t name the one but there is one listed in the piracy community megathread, a Russian one, semi-private. I would search disc titles first to make sure what you’re doing doesn’t already exist and focus on archiving and sharing original non-re-encoded copies of those which don’t presently exist elsewhere.
I asked the same thing about a year ago This tutorial worked good for me
+1 for that Jeff Geerling video. Excellent tutorial.
Wasn’t the old software… Handbrake? I want to say?
I’m not in with the cool kids these days. I commented to share my sliver of potential knowledge and to be able to easily come back to see the answers.
Cheers!