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submitted 22 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) by Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works to c/linux@lemmy.ml

Hi everyone!

I have around 200 DVD (with movies) that I’d want to backup in order to save them from rotting or physical media disappearance.

My most powerful computer with a DVD drive is a 2012 MacBook Pro upgraded to 16gb of Ram with an SSD running Fedora 42.

If possible, I’d want to keep all the bonuses of the movies, but I could also just backup the movies if keeping the whole disc is too difficult.

My goal would be to keep the original quality.

Also 6-7 discs are already skipping scenes even if the disc shows no damage.

I’ve bought some of these discs 20 years ago with my teenager pocket money so I wouldn’t want to lose them.

Thanks for the help.

As I own these discs and nothing would be illegal in my country, I thought it would be better to post here instead of the piracy community.

Edit: I guess I’ll use Make MKV Beta as it seems to work well and VLC can open the MKV files. Thanks for your help!

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[-] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 7 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

I think the best bet to preserve them as is, would be dd or ddrescue (if there are read errors). You might be able to write a small shell script to automate stuff. For example open the tray, read a filename from the user, then close the tray, rip it and then repeat. That way you'll notice the open tray, change disks, enter the tiltle and hit enter and come back 10mins later. Obviously takes something like 20 days if you do 10 each day. And you're looking for roughly 1TB of storage, if it's single layer DVDs.

[-] balsoft@lemmy.ml 4 points 20 hours ago

read a filename from the user

Honestly for something repetitive like this I'd suggest trying to avoid user interaction completely. It's probably better to get that info from the DVD drive itself (blkid -o value -s LABEL /dev/dvd), or if that fails assign a number.

[-] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 5 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

Sure. Are the labels human-readable? Otherwise I'd rather type it in while I'm in front of the computer anyways, with the new DVD in my hand. Rather than end up with a directory with 200 cryptic filenames... I meaan the interaction with changing the disks can't be skipped anyway...

this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
67 points (97.2% liked)

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