Ripping DVD's to an External HDD

[ovechkin678]

Hello,

I am exploring the idea of ripping many of my DVD's onto an External Hard Drive to make them easy to travel with. Is there a certain External drive that is better for this kind of thing? Recommended size? And what is the best software to use to accomplish this?

 

[Mr5oh]

Any external drive would be fine. USB 3.0 would be preferred. It would be better to do everything you need to on a local hard drive then transfer them to an external hard drive though, as externals can slow things down.

Personally I use Handbrake for most all ripping. It also works well for transcoding as I don't need everything DVD quality to watch on my tablet or laptop while traveling. I find 480 perfectly acceptable, but this I'm sure is a personal preference. After I get them into an MP4 format, I use mp3gain (aacgain) to normalize the sound levels.

Avidemux is good if you need to cut out any sections or splice things together. If you ever want to create custom DVDs with multiple movies (with menus) I use Bombono.

All the programs I listed are free, and have both Linux and Windows versions (except Bombono).

 

[Rookie_MIB]

A lot depends on how you want to encode those DVDs and if you want to compress them. A straight ISO rip of a DVD is about 4-5GB, while if you compress it to a normal HQ MP4, you can take it down to a quarter of that size easily.

So - your average 1TB external drive can handle about 200 ISO rips, or about 800 MP4 encodes. Of course if you get a bigger drive (2 or 3TB externals are easily available too), multiply by the TB count.

Software you'll need:
DVD Decryptor (or some ripper)
Handbrake (for encoding)
Virtual DVD mounting tool (mounts ISO folder as a 'virtual' dvd drive for playing).

 

[ovechkin678]

Thanks for the quick responses. Ill look into the software.

The other things that I should have posted originally are...

1. The DVDs will be ripped onto a Windows machine, but need to be playable on a MAC.

2. I would like the movies to be at least 720p quality. (I am sure the quality is where the file sizes come into play)

 

[Mr5oh]

I do everything in Linux, so I am assuming the Windows variants of the programs I listed have the similar capabilities. When I use HandBrake is has the Apple friendly option of using m4v (or whatever it is) instead of MP4.

You specify quality and size that you want in Handbrake, so it is transcoding it as it rips it.

 

[madmatt30]

Dvd 's are 480p max native res so transcoding to 720p will increase file size for nothing

 

[Rookie_MIB]

^^ Exactly, unless you're using the generic 'dvd' to include BluRay discs.

 

[ovechkin678]

One more question just to make sure I do this correct the first time. Would hate to spend all of this time ripping DVDs to find I messed up.

The external I am using is brand new out of the box. If I format it and do all of this on my Windows machine, I need to make sure that it is completely usable on a MAC machine afterwards.

 

[madmatt30]

Format the external drive as fat32 or exfat rather than NTFS & it will be readable/writeable by both windows & Mac os.

There is a max single file size limit of 4gb which should not affect you.

http://www.mactip.net/guide-how-to-format-an-external-drive-to-work-seamlessly-with-macs-and-pcs-without-third-party-software/

 

[ovechkin678]

Ah gotcha.

 

[ovechkin678]

Another noob question. 😀

I tried ripping in Handbrake and was having some issues so I went and downloaded DVDFab. It ripped it fine and fast enough. (Only semi annoying part is it puts their name (DVDfab) on the screen in the corner for maybe the first minute, no big deal though)

My question is, is there a real reason to use Handbrake at this point? The movie came out watchable just fine after ripping from DVDfab.

EDIT: I answered my own question when it wasn't playing properly on the MAC. 😀

Thanks for the help everyone!

 

[amyhou]

I recommond you a totally free dvd ripping tool named DVD shrink, you can download it form its offical site to have a try. DVDShrink is software to backup DVD discs. You can use this software in conjunction with DVD burning software of your choice, to make a backup copy of any DVD video disc. In addition, DVDShrink also allows you to re-author your DVD. You can make your own compilation from one or more source DVDs, or select only the parts of a DVD which you intend to view, thus preserving more space on your backup for the highest quality viewing.