Tip Of The Day: Starting Your Digital DVD Collection
In Lord Of The Rings epic fashion, I started on my journey to rip and catalog my DVD/Blu-ray library. The first step in this process is to decide which format you want your DVDs to be ripped in. There are several methods to do this and here are a few of the more common methods.
1. Rip an exact ISO and mount with Daemon Tools.
2. Rip the file structure (Video_TS) and have the program play it from the hard drive
3. Convert to DVR.MS
There are a lot of ways to skin this cat including encoding to various file formats etc. In the end, I chose #3. The pros for this choice is that the DVR.MS is simply a container change and does not affect file quality, Video ReDo can rip a DVD in about 20 minutes in this method, FF/RW work, and this file works with extenders. The bad part about this is that it strips out the extras! If you are an extras junky, #3 is not the method you want to employ. However, I am a movie person and I can pop the DVD in if I want to watch the extras.
The procedure I have chosen is based around a couple of commercial programs. Video ReDo and AnyDVD (HD). For SD DVD ripping AnyDVD strips out the copy protection allowing Video ReDo to do the container conversion to dvr.ms without having to physically rip the DVD to the hard drive (which is another method of stripping copy protection). For TV season discs, it also has a joiner option that will you to have all of a season in one file. Which may or may not be something you are interested in.
Again, this is for personal backup and cataloging only :).
The two programs above are going to run you around 200 US Dollars. Is it worth it? From a DVD ripping standpoint, it seems a bit expensive as there are free tools that will get you what you need. Though the method I have chosen is pretty easy. The good things is that both programs offer additional utility. Video-ReDo is a full DVD authoring suite and will remove commercials. AnyDVDHD is currently the only program the will allow you to rip Blu-ray and HD DVDs. With all of that combined, these two programs make for a pretty powerful combination of programs to manage your digital DVD library.