I know this has positively, absolutely nothing to do with flightsim anything but there are so many smart folks here I thought I'd try it anyway. I have a collection of movies on DVD. I've been buying them for now over 15 years. Recently, I ran across two that, no matter what I tried, wouldn't play correctly. So I decided it was time to backup the entire collection to be sure that wouldn't happen again.

Technology is a never changing thing and I've found that physical discs are really a thing of the past. So my tech-smart son advised me to back them up some other way. After a lot of research I chose high-quality .mp4 files. I did a lot more research and found that the best freeware process to convert this stuff is called Handbrake. I finally found out how to use it and started off on my backup quest.

Now, here's the problem/question. I have 1639 DVDs to back up. And it's taking around 40-50 minutes to do each one. I have no idea if it's possible, but does anyone know of a really high-quality process that's faster (I'm looking for a really high-quality 480p)?.....Doug

Edited January 25, 20215 yr by W2DR
kant spel

Speed I think is a function of your optical drive and cpu.  On Windows I suggest using MakeMKV (free, but you have to renew the free license every so often.  You can also buy what so far has been a life-time license).  I like mkv file container as it is more versatile and easy to adjust metadata, or add streams (like subtitles).  Not all players like mkv though.  Note that MakeMKV does not encode your video file; it leaves it however it was encoded on the DVD (for commercial movies mp2). 

 

You might also look at VidCoder (free).  It is a Windows GUI front end for the handbrake library and I find it much easier to use than the Handbrake GUI.  This one will re-encode your video and audio.  An alternative is command line ffmpeg (also free).  Getting good command line options takes some work (but doing some searching will locate many examples to cut and paste).  ffmpeg has an advantage that you can use it in a batch file if you have many files to do.

 

Another approach is to rip iso files (can't recommend a good iso ripper though).  That gives you the ability to keep DVD menus if you prefer navigating through them (it leaves the original format ifo and vob files).  I do have a payware program IsoBuster but that is good for damaged media, not speed.

 

Something else I use is AviDemux (free) despite it's name it doesn't just work on avi containers.  It has some editing and filtering capabilities (it is not a "movie making" program though).

 

I never play around with upscaling / downscaling / cropping.  I let the player or TV do any of that.  I also leave frame rate as in the source for the same reason.

 

Once you rip all your physical media you might consider a NAS to store them.  I use a Synology 4 bay currently just have 2 bays filled with 6x2 Tb in RAID (learned to use RAID the hard way).  But cost wise now might look at 10x2 Tb.

scott s.

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Edited January 26, 20215 yr by scott967

Thanks Scott. All good advice. I have to stick with .mp4's for a variety of reasons - compatibility being the major one. I didn't know VidCoder so I'll certainly explore that. I have a couple of spare 10TB drives I'll be using but not in a RAID configuration. There's nothing I can do about the CPU/optical drive speeds. I'm running an OC's 10700K with Plextor optical drives. So...maybe what-it-is-is-what-it-is. What the heck, I'm retired and this stuff keeps me out of the bars  🙂 ........Doug