my DVD burning guide or copying guide for blu-ray too!!

I like collecting media, I don't have a lot because I'm poor but what I do have I cherish because it is a period of my life for years I was at home sick all I had was my PC, my Mum and a screen to lean my head against insanely terribly miserable and broken hearted.

So I have a couple of folders of DVD discs of movies and shows I collected. I have limited server space as I did want a silent SSD array of 4 8TB discs.. but you know what they are about $1000 dollars each disc so that's about $4000 just for 4 SSD's.

So I have two 8TB HDD (16 Terabytes of space).. and really because I chose RAID1 config, I did want retention in case a drive failed I only get about 7.5TB after all that. Because the drives mirror.

They are nearly full up!! I keep a lot of old files and things too backed up, NAS are great every home should have one if they have computers. Though often just an external SSD is good enough. I wanted to demystify computers and networking a bit for myself. I realise now they are just a toy, like a motorbike, or train set or whatever!!

But I will maybe get another two 8TB drives HDD at some stage to complete my NAS Server.

The movies I have were all collected off sites that were legitimate I never hacked or tried to get around any sort of legal stuff, just downloaded them, and I rarely watch any anyway, because most are not good quality and not 4K and I have seen them too many times, and to be honest I don't really like a lot of them anyway.

I was dazzled as a kid by the action but it wears off after 40.

Still I love collecting files on my server and then passing them through to my screen, TV or whatever it is like a fetish to organise films and watch them this way and stream them myself in control of my viewing. I have paid for these movies so many times I don't even care, I just like experimenting with configuring servers and stuff.

But I did want to copy them to my server as ISO, which is a format of a whole file copy of a DVD.. for example "Tom Cruise - Risky Business.iso" if I want to watch it I need a media player that opens and loads iso files. Or convert it to a media format like a container .mp4 or .mkv or .avi or .mpg.

I'll let you research that yourself.

Some software I found helpful.

MakeMKV Beta is good to copy DVD's and blu-rays too. You can get a serial code from a forum to use it for free for that month provided it's not commercial use, just personal at home yourself. Which is fair enough they are protecting you from prosecution and themselves.

So you can get this program MakeMKV and you can extract an encrypted .mkv movie file from the DVD of your choice to watch later on.

But!! I wanted just to copy the whole disc to keep in backup as an ISO.

So in the menu after it has loaded don't open the disc, just select Backup. Name your file and away you go. Might take anywhere from 20 mins to an hour or so per disc.

So that's ok, but some files are corrupted so they are not easy to copy, they are old discs like 20 years old.

So I also used ImgBurn software for some other ones which doesn't remove encryption but some of my discs already had it removed.

And I also found a program called BurnAware Free. All of these programs are free of course, but MakeMKV Beta you can buy it, save fishing around for serials on forums.

So we have:

MakeMKV Beta

ImgBurn

BurnAware Free (don't think it decrypts either but might be able get a patch.. or there is another program where you get a libxxx file.. look around.. I can't explain it here its not legal to remove encryption really.. I just mention it for making MKV beta or copying already decrypted files. For my amusement when I am out of money for buying new movies.

There was a good one called DVD Decrypter but it's not supported anymore but might work on older discs.

This is it... for Handbrake:

QUOTE: "libdvdcss is an open-source software library developed by the VideoLAN project (the makers of VLC media player) that allows other applications to play and rip DVDs encrypted with Content Scramble System (CSS) and bypass region codes.
It works by finding and providing the necessary decryption keys to media players or rippers like HandBrake and VLC, enabling them to access the DVD's content across various regions."

And I couldn't find a decent software Blu-Ray player so I have given up for now, they all have extra charges to use them, even the free ones they say are free, so maybe I will buy PowerDVD? (I probably got an old version but not support Blu-Ray!!.. They usually come with DVD drives hardware purchases. Though mine was AliExpress, the firmware didn't work to update so it's a pirate copy I guess). Still very good quality Drive!! I was impressed who needs updates!!

Now if you say copy your disc and you find you want to encode a movie, try Handbrake, its really good, the preloaded settings are pretty good, you can tweak them to suit your screen size and viewing preferences and its pretty fast too. You can choose various sizes and quality settings in presets. Save an .mp4, .mkv, .avi or .mpg I think.

So thats about it!!

Back to copying for me I got heaps to go!! You can use an internal DVD or Blu-Ray drive they are getting harder to find and finding cases to support them I use Antec P10C silent case its great has a slot at the top of the front behind the door, though the BeQuiet! series are good too I have one of those, very quiet cases for movie watching.

Some external drives are good, watch if you want to watch or burn UHD Blu-Ray it is not the same as regular Blu-Ray and you might not be able to run the bigger discs.

My new tower, with new Antec Case and new DVD Blu-Ray drive. The insides were already owned just transported from my old case. So only cost about $140 the case and the Drive I think was about $100 or something??