General advice for newbie

[james360]

I have just purchased disc on line and playing about with it at the moment to familarise myself.

What I want to do is transfer my dvd stock and cd stock to external hard drive/s over a period of time.
I will not be creating any new copies.
I have both a linux mint and windows 10 dual boot.

What I want advice on is :-
Should I go for iso or mkv input to the hard drive ?
I understand VLC will play the mkv directly from hard drive without a problem.
Afterwards will both windows and linux be able to read my external drive/s


Have retired now and trying to simplfy my stock of audio cds and dvds and make less clutter.

Many thanks,
James

[Woodstock]

Do you watch the movies on the DVDs, or are you also interested in watching the extras? Do you want to use DVD/Bluray menus, or just go directly to the content?

Going to MKV files and only keeping the features takes less space than trying to keep the whole structure of a DVD or a BD. And, by going to MKV files, you can use programs like handbrake to shrink the files to take even less space.

But, if your interest is in maintaining the DVD/BD "experience", you have to go with ISOs for DVDs, and Backups for BDs.

[james360]

Thanks Woodstock.
Will go with iso but cannot quite work out how to do it to the hard drive.
From what I can see it is assuming I want to copy an iso the other way around.
Will play about with it but if you have a quick solution that would be helpful.
Thought I got there once but it came up with an error along the way.
Working with a desktop and 1tb external hard drive.
No BDs involved .
Just DVDs
James

[Woodstock]

A typical DVD, when converted to an ISO file, will be around 5 GB. So your 1 TB drive will only hold about 200 of them, in raw form.

The easiest way I've found to convert them is to use a Mac or Linux computer (or virtual machine) with the utility dd. But there are still Windows-based conversions available. One I used years ago was "BDLot DVD ISO Master", which can still be found on a number of mostly-reputable websites. It hasn't been updated in about 8 years, but still works. It has the option to remove the CSS encryption when it creates the ISO, which means a lot more programs can play the ISO.

Just remember that converting the disks to MKV files will probably double how many movies you can have on that 1 TB drive, and running them through something like Handbrake to shrink them can get "a lot" more video on it. The nice thing is, the tools are cheap or free, and you can experiment to find what works for you (aka "Play").

[james360]

Thanks Woodstock.
I will go over to the linux side of my pc and have a go.
Does the registration code supplied to me for pc still apply in the linux side.

James

[Woodstock]

Yes, the code even works for Macs.

But that really doesn't matter if you're going the ISO route, because MakeMKV doesn't "do" creating ISOs. It can read them and make MKVs from them later, but generating an ISO file isn't one of its functions.

[james360]

Got sorted in the end Woodstock !!
Wasted a lot of time and I think it was the discs all along.

Am going as you suggest with makemkv on windows with setup disc I got through post through post.
At least I discovered that this is best route from you.

I was concentrating on some old steam railway dvds that were made up of 3 or 4 archieved documentaries each.
Makemkv was rolling merrily along at about 8.0 and then suddenly drop to .02 speed giving about an hour and a half to do the disc.
iso would not read it at all.
I reckon some of the documentaries were old film stuff remastered or something and difficult to extract somehow.
At least that's my story !!!

Anyway tried some of my other dvds and they read oution about 15 minutes.
The iso also read but I will now go with makemkv on the project.
Will just keep the railway dvds as collectors items and not bother with them.

Thank you for your help and direction I should take with the project.
regards.

James