I'm trying to figure out the best way to do it. Anyone done it before. I would ideally want all my stuff in one location. I have a Vudo account with some purchased films there, but I have to many DVDs at $2 a pop, it would get quite expensive.
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First step is to get Movies Anywhere. It links Vudu, itunes, Google Play, Microsoft, Amazon, and others. A few studios don't participate though (main holdout is Paramount).
Honestly, the cheapest way is the Vudu Disc-to-Digital program, if the movies are available. $2 for a blu-ray, or $5 to upgrade a DVD to HD. There are folks out there who sell the digital code that comes packed with blu-rays, and they usually sell for less than the usual digital price.
Keep an eye out for Vudu deals. They like to attach credits to random things at Wal-Mart. Last spring, they had a deal where if you bought a certain kind of beef jerky, you could get a $10 credit, up to five times. They did an even better deal around Halloween where you could get a $3 credit for buying a box of popcorn. Most of the eligible boxes sold for about $1.50. Every once in a while, they give you a credit or percent off coupon for watching one of their free movies. (And by watching, you just have to be signed in and have a device play the movie.)
After Microsoft joined Movies Anywhere, I signed up for Microsoft Rewards specifically to earn credit for movies. It's not a lot of work to get points each day, but it can take some time to build up enough credit for movies. It's really good though when they offer their giftcards for sale. I also linked my wife's rewards account so she can transfer 5000 points a month over to mine, and then we use the rest to redeem Wal-Mart gift cards which I use at Vudu.
I keep an eye on several of the forums at blu-ray.com. They have a section for deals, and also the digital movie section keeps track of the movies available with disc to digital and has a spreadsheet complete with working UPCs. (I had a few movies that were D2D eligible, but for some reason, I didn't have the exact release that allowed for conversion, so that list helped me out.)
The answer to this question really depends on what you plan on doing with the DVDs. Are you planning on playing on a media center device at your house and stream to your TV? To rip DVDs and Blurays, I use a program called MakeMKV. This program rips DVDs and Blurays to a MKV file that can be played by pretty much any media player out there. However, it does not transcode the video and they are quite large since they are usually in the MPEG-2 format. This program is nice because it works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. I run this on Linux, save to a 1.5 TB drive, and transcode them to a more reasonable size (usually H.265) using a program call Handbrake. Once they are smaller, I copy them them to a microSD card on my phone. I have quite the video library on my phone from this.
I'll add a +1 to using MakeMKV and Handbrake. MakeMKV is a fairly straightforward program, though depending on the content, it can get a little confusing when trying to figure out which video file is the one you want (instead of the bonus content). This gets even more annoying when ripping TV shows that have multiple episodes/seasons on a single disk.
Once you have ripped your DVDs, I'll throw in a recommendation for Plex, which is a media server that allows you to stream your content on from your computer, to any other devices you own. They have apps for pretty much any device. The main downside is that you need to leave your computer on anytime you want to stream something. But if you are looking for a way to maintain a library of all of your personal media in a central location, Plex is a very good option.
Relevant for Plex (link)
+1 for all the comments thus far.
A couple years back, I wanted to digitize my dvd collection and thought that I could just do a few everyday and eventually finish. I was wrong. I stopped at about a dozen because it just took too long. The part that sucked most was making sure you were ripping the correct title # on the dvd. Studios got creative over the years and started mixing up the title where the main movie played from. So you have to hunt for this before ripping the dvd.
Maybe one day I will resume digitizing my dvd catalog. There is just no time to rip hundreds of dvds when the kiddos won't even let you sh!t in peace and quiet. 🤣
This. So much this.
There is just no time to rip hundreds of dvds when the kiddos won't even let you sh!t in peace and quiet.
Leg for making this perfectly clear.
I didn't start out with a large physically media collection, so ripping it wasn't too bad and now it's easy to rip as I acquire new movies. I don't think I will ever attempt to rip a TV series again though.
I ripped a bluray collection of an entire series for my GF recently and it was a nightmare. There were usually 2-4 versions of every episode on nine disks. Each episode had a video file that included the intro/previous-season-recap and a version without the intro stuff. There were some episodes that had director's commentary (not just the audio track with the commentary, but the same 5.7GB worth of video too) or a preliminary artwork version of the episode. Finally, there was a combined file with every episode stitched together in a large file size and small file size. Of course, none of the titles have any useful metadata, so I ended up watching a few minutes of every episode just to figure out what it was.
sigh...
HandbrakeCLI -i [input disc] -t 0 --scan
That will scan all the titles, and identify the feature title. It also shows the duration of each title, as a sanity check. Some TV series discs will have 6-7 episodes, and report a "feature title" that chains all of them together (probably not what you want).
Then you change the -t number to the title (s) you actually want to process.
This works, however, it's not always foolproof for the ones that have the "99 titles with the same duration" protection. Big mouse and its affiliated distributions were notorious for this and I hated it. You always had to double check the title to ensure you ripped the correct title. It's the extra sanity check and it makes digitizing (or even backing up
owned dvds) a bit more annoying because you'd need to actually play the dvd to verify the correct title holding the movie.
I'm glad I came across this post, because it's the next set of questions I had after this post from last year.
I've targeted a NAS (Synology DS918+) to purchase, with the intention of using the NAS as a Plex server, as well as just for storing data (pictures and files) on the network. Now I am looking towards what I need for ripping my DVDs to digital. The suggestions for MakeMKV and Handbrake are ones that I've seen in several places (in r/plex and other random guides online), so thank you for those recommendations.
Where I'm fuzzy is format and encoding. I want to minimize processing needs on the NAS when streaming. Is there a specific format/codec to use? Should I go with h.265 over h.264 or some other codec? What format to use? What native resolution should I save the file in? Does MakeMKV/Handbrake do that?
I haven't started ripping any discs yet, so I don't have to worry about translating existing files, I can put them into whatever format I want from the beginning, I just don't know what format to use. Also, should I rip them onto my computer and just filecopy them over to the NAS? Or should I rip them directly to the NAS? How does that work with filename conventions and Plex's recognition of the file as a specific movie? Should I rip them all into one format/codec, or should I have different resolutions for BluRay and DVDs?
I'll bet y'all didn't know it was Stupid Question Week on TKP, did ya?
Choosing the right codec and container is heavily dependent on the devices you plan on using to stream with (aka a streaming set-top box/TV/tablet/game console).
Plex has a pretty good built-in transcoding system called Optimized Versions that will create different versions of the same video in a format that should be able to stream to the target device without transcoding.
If you already plan on using Plex, I would recommend ripping your collection using MakeMKV (which I am pretty sure just copies the file on the disk into an MKV container in whichever native codec was used during the encoding). Do this on your regular computer (I doubt it is feasible to run on a NAS). Plex will be able to handle whatever MakeMKV spits out.
Once you rip the files, name them according to the Plex Naming Conventions and then copy over to your NAS.
Once on your NAS, you can let Plex do the heavy lifting and optimize all of your files into however many versions you need. It looks like your proposed DS918+ should be able to handle background transcoding safely. This process will likely take forever, and you probably should avoid trying to stream from plex or using the NAS in any other way while it is running.
Once Plex has an optimized version of one of your videos, I think you should be able to delete the original (very large) file. As long as Plex recognized the file to begin with, you won't have to worry about the naming of the other versions (Plex will do this automatically).
Thank you.
It's been a couple of years but I used a program called DVD Catalyst to burn all my DVDs to my computer. Then I copied them to network storage. Very flexible program.