Backing up your ageing DVD collection efficiently

This post is basically a follow on from a previous post “Backing up your ageing CD collection efficiently”, so the title is kind of a play on words.

There are two ways to go (or both) when it comes to “backing up” your digital versatile discs, the first is to copy the disc to an .iso image for digital storage.

Being a big fan of efficiency, I am an advocate of command line power (or terminal emulator power if you’re being pedantic).

dd if=/dev/dvd of=~/mydvd.iso

You may need to replace /dev/dvd with /dev/sr0 if your DVDROM drive is USB powered.

You may also need to install libdvdcss2 to read the DVD if it’s encrypted/copy protected. sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2 should nail that. If not, google medibuntu and follow the instructions to add the medibuntu repository to your package manager, then install libdvdcss2, amongst other multimedia goodies on offer (such as w32codecs).

So, with your DVD backed up to an ISO file, you’re done. Well yes, but those ISO files are pretty big at 4GB+, so why not go the extra mile and mount the .iso as a loopback device, then use the wonderfully simple DVDRIP program to re-encode the 4GB video on the mounted .iso file into a less space hungry, compressed video format that weighs in at a mere 700MB?

mkdir ~/myiso

sudo mount -t iso9660 -o loop /path/to/mydvd.iso /home/matt/myiso

If you haven’t already installed dvdrip, then…

sudo apt-get install dvdrip rar

Then run dvdrip and configure it with valid paths where necessary so it can store its files during the rip and re-encoding process. The paths show as red if they’re invalid and go green when they’re valid. Type /home/matt/myiso for the DVDROM device (where it says /dev/dvd by default) to rip the video from your mounted .iso file instead of an actual dvdrom device. dvdrip won’t be able to tell the difference since the kernels loopback module is now presenting the .iso file as a device.

You should now be able to read the table of contents and re-encode the “DVD” into a compressed video format of your choosing, reducing it’s resulting filesize to as low as 700MB before loosing too much in the way of quality provided “2 pass encoding” is checked. The re-encoding process will take time – how much depends on your CPU.