There should be a folder with a name like VIDEO_TS. That is what you need to copy. Put it on an HDD, SDD, whatever you want—it’s a digital copy.
Don’t players like VLC automatically play the files without the user needing to do anything explicitly?
I don’t think that will work.
You need to remove the CSS from the files first, using Handbrake (and the associated helpers), or something like MakeMKV.
The cable you need to transfer digital audio is called a TOSLINK, you would obviously need a player and computer that both supported it, were talking fifty year old technology here, my cassette player, Mini Disk and SoundBlaster all supported it back in the eighties. I’m not sure how that meshes with DVD’s copy protection, I would expect it to be illegal and impossible to re record the digital stream
TOSLINK is the optical media version of an interconnect carrying S/PDIF. You can carry this format on a whole range of media, and in the domestic setting, coax is also seen. S/PDIF doesn’t carry any copy protection other than a “please don’t copy me” flag in the metadata. The data is otherwise in the clear. In principle, machines intended for domestic use, capable of making digital copies, were supposed to refuse to copy signals with this flag set. You can guess how well this worked in practice.
The professional digital audio format AES/EBU aka AES3, is actually near identical to S/PDIF, although it supports more options and sample rates, and can be aggregated to support a large number of channels. It is also specified to run over a twisted pair using XLR connectors - which is not a great idea in practice. AES/EBU does not include the copy protection flag. (You are a professional see, clearly you would never copy something.)
These formats have not gone away, and there is a huge amount of equipment available that supports them. A USB adaptor that can suck on S/PDif over Toslink can be had for about twenty bucks.
I’m enjoying the semi-hijacks into obscure formats and history. I’ve certainly contributed my tidbits upthread and may well again.
But going back to our semi-confused and decidedly audio/computer amateur OP, what he wants to do is copy the data files off a DVD and onto a computer then later watch them there.
So there’s really two simple and mostly unrelated steps here:
Get a suitable drive and cable to copy data files from the DVD disk to the computer’s HD as data files. Which might require a specialized copy app to work around anti-piracy features built into consumer DVD drives.
Get a suitable playback app that can read the data files from the computer HD and output video and audio onto the computer’s screen and speakers. Which might require a specialized playback app to work around anti-piracy features built into the data files coming off consumer DVD drives.
Reading the files is easy. That’s what DVD Player does now. It’s a native app to OSX.
But sadly, I wish to “rip” my DVDs onto a hard drive.
It’s common knowledge that commercially “pressed” DVDs are nothing but wicked thin aluminum wafers with dimples. Similarly, home-burned DVDs and CDs are nothing more than wicked thin aluminum wafers that can react by “shadowing” when a laser pulses at them, creating the same patterns as those made by commercial machines.
Neither is made to last 20+ years. My home-burned DVDs of the kids and so on may not play right now- and most of them are 25+ years old.
Hate to lose all of that good stuff, and don’t want to pay a bloody fortune per minute for an outfit to copy them for me……
You’ve already been given the answer. Handbrake will rip the DVDs for you.
Yes, I also have over 600 DVD’s and every so often think about a “jukebox” system where all the content is instead on a hard drive (or several) and can be played from a computer attached to my entertainment system. 4.5GB/disc, 1,000 discs (allowing for multi-disc sets) is 4.5TB. I already own a 6TB and a 4TB disk. It would just be a lot of work and programming.
DVDshrink was designed back when disk space did not allow for a lot of storage, so it reduced any dual-layer DVD to the size of a single-layer disc so it could be burned onto ordinary single-layer DVDR’s or the option of creating single-file output of the main feature on the disc - like Handbrake.
And of course, the last decade or so I’ve mostly been buying Blu-Ray, which ups the ante in data file size. I’ve never bothered to look for a blu-ray ripper, but apparently they are out there.
But a ripper program does not care if you purchased or borrowed or rented or stole the disc. That’s why I didn’t mention a link to DVDshrink or Handbrake. I’ve tried both. They work. I just don’t bother trying to watch movies on my iPhone. iPad works OK.
IIRC, the original DVDshrink was pulled years ago because it violated the CSS proprietary encoding which was protected under law. As others mention, it doesn’t seem to be an issue the last decade or two. When it was pulled, there were warnings about surreptitious versions that like all pedigree-less software on the internet from dubious sources, may contain malware. Anytime you download something, use caution.
But yes, just connecting the DVD and running a player will not give you unencrypted files. (Although I did run across some discs that have no encryption, typically international or smaller distribution companies). Then there’s the issue of regional encoding.
Just to clarify some stuff… there’s a few layers to this situation…
The TLDR for the OP: Just rip your files using Handbrake or similar. It’s a standard thing that many people have done over the last decades; no need to overthink it.
Longer version…
Re: legality and piracy:
Most commercial retail DVDs are copy-protected, and often region-locked. You can’t just copy the files to a computer and expect to be able to play them back on a generic PC later. You have to get rid of the copy protection first. Whether this is piracy is a legal gray area. Bypassing the protection is in fact a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. But doing so to make a personal copy for your own use, and not redistributing it, may or may not constitute fair use – it’s not really been tested in court, as far as I know. But you would do so using the same process and tools that actual pirates use; the only difference being that you wouldn’t then go on to share your personal copy with thousands of other people. (See Digital Millennium Copyright Act - Wikipedia and Ripping - Wikipedia for legal status, and libdvdcss - Wikipedia and AnyDVD - Wikipedia for workarounds)
My home-burned DVDs of the kids and so on may not play right now- and most of them are 25+ years old.
For your home DVDs, you almost certainly don’t have to worry about copy protection. Just rip them into a modern format and keep the output files somewhere safe. You might lose the original menus and bonus tracks (if you made any), but the main video and audio should be rippable just fine.
Re: DVD file formats:
For commercial movies, separate from the copy protection, you wouldn’t want to just copy the DVD files to your computer even if you could. The video and audio codecs used in DVDs are ancient by today’s standards, and you can get the same quality in a much smaller file by re-encoding it to a modern video codec (which is what Handbrake does). But it’s still going to look a lot worse than a modern BluRay rip, or even the same movie streamed online, because DVDs max out at 480p. Modern 4k videos have 24 times the resolution… not 2.4, twenty-four.
But again, this doesn’t matter for home videos, since that’s (presumably) the only source you have – there is no 4k version to rip from. Thankfully, modern upscalers are pretty good, and even if you play back a low-resolution DVD rip, the right software (like VLC) can make the final output look even better than the DVD original thanks to modern upsampling and de-interlacing techniques.
Re: cables & connections
There is no reason to tinker with TOSlink, DVI, or any other cable aside from the USB connection from your DVD-ROM drive to your computer. Those other outputs, while “digital”, are used only for regular real-time playback (i.e. to a home audio system or TV), not when you’re reading the DVD disc directly on a computer. If you try to record the playback stream, you have to do so in real-time… that would take forever. There’s no advantage to that when you can just read the files directly off the disc much quicker.
When you rip from the disc to a computer directly, it is just reading the binary data directly off the DVD and this can happen 10-20 times quicker than real-time playback, depending on how fast your computer is. Probably the bottleneck will be your processor or graphics card, used in re-encoding the video, rather than your DVD drive speed.
I used MakeMKV to rip all on my DVD, Blu-ray, AND HDDvd disks. No loss of video quality, and MKV is playable by most video players.
You can actually have multiple audio tracks and subtitles with MKV.
If you have a non-copy-protected (i.e. home-made) DVD with complex menus etc - I had a DVDR with hard drive once that allowed this, and would record TV programs - then there is also the option of simply making an ISO image file of the contents. IIRC, VLC player among others will play an ISO image as if it were a disc. I think Windows Media will even play it if you go through the trouble of mounting the ISO image as a disc.
There are plenty of ISO creation programs out there. They just don’t unencrypt commercial DVDs.
If perfect fidelity is required, then yes, this is an option. However, it will make the resulting files much, much bigger and more difficult to work with and back up (especially in the cloud).
If you just care about the main videos, IMO it’s better to just rip them to a modern standard and back them up in multiple places.
When DVD first came out I loved all the creative, fancy menus and exploring them was one of the fun parts of getting a new DVD. But after a while they started to be just annoying, especially when there were unskippable menu sequences and unskippable “don’t copy that floppy or the FBI will kill you dead” messages. I started ripping all of my DVDs and left the originals on the shelf untouched. Especially with box sets. For instance, if I’m in the mood to watch a few episodes of Buffy, I don’t want to have to think about which of the 39 DVDs particular episodes are on, then go through the bloody menus on each disc. It is vastly better to have all of them sitting in one folder. (It helped that since the mid 1990s I was buying video cards with outputs to TVs anyway.)
Remember, two decades covers nearly the whole history of DVD. I was “ripping” my DVDs before deCSS existed by playing them while capturing from the input of my video card. In MPEG1, because it was also before the first version of DivX/MPEG4 came out. And that was far slower than realtime in encoding anyway. After deCSS and DivX first became available it took around 10x realtime to transcode a DVD to DivX even on a reasonably powerful PC at the time. And required a much higher bitrate to acheive a given quality compared to modern codecs. (The only reason the specific deCSS tool became irrelevant is because computers became fast enough to just brute-force go through all of the keys for the 40-bit encryption in a couple of minutes instead of having to go around it.)
Speaking of codecs, OP, my recommendation to you is to skip reproducing menu structures and just transcode to relatively high-bitrate h.265/x.265 video and aac audio. A crf of 25 for the video and a bitrate of 128 for the audio should be plenty. (I compress more agressively than that myself.) You’ll need to take a little time to familiarize yourself with some of the details of ffmpeg (behind the curtain in Handbrake) but nothing too painful.
(Eta to add a little explanation. Crf= constant rate factor, where you pick a specific quality of video you want and the codec chooses the bitrate needed to achieve that quality. The bitrate changes from moment to moment depending on the complexity of the scene. This is opposed to constant bitrate options which use the same bitrate throughout the encode, even though there will be moments when that rate is overkill and moments when that rate isn’t really enough.)
There’s no “almost” about it. For obvious reasons, the DVD standard explicitly does not support CSS copy protection on burned DVDs. If it did, it would be trivial to duplicate commercial DVDs without disabling copy protection.
Same here. I have Network Attached Strorage (NAS) with terabytes of capacity for 700-800 DVD, Blu-Ray and 4K titles that I can use to play movies/music on any device in the house.
I usually use HandBrake to compress some (all DVDs and most Blu-Rays) of the resulting files a bit to save space, but I’ll leave them in the MKV format.
HandBrake will allow you to save in MP4 format as well.
MakeMKV and HandBrake are well regarded in Home Theater circles.
HandBrake is still free, and you get 30 days to try MakeMKV, then pay a $60 one time fee for the full license.
It’s all very easy and VERY convenient.