What is the goto software/suite for ripping DVDs these days? It has been ages since I've done any.

One of my first jobs in IT I worked in a local newspaper - I thought I wanted to be a journalist turns out it's boring. Anyway we had all the old archived papers on a dvd and someone used it as a coaster and erased about 10 years worth of files. Naturally there were zero backups, so that data was just gone. Fantastic.

Fortunately the local library has backups but they're on microfiche, so not particularly convenient. I think Google might have scanned them now though so they're probably archived again.

Disk rot usually happens when air gets in contact with the reflective coating and oxidises it. With CD's, it's actually the top side you need to be worried about, as it's right there under a thin lacquer coating. Any ding to that can expose the layer or just literally chip off a chunk of data.

At least on DVD's it's sandwiched inside the disk, so usually the only reason is a manufacturing error, and not really something the user can cause.

And I have PDO pressings of Faith No More albums that are almost 40 years old and have just started to rot. Common occurrence with PDO pressings apparently; one manufacturing error is all it takes.

Tapes are overall simply worse. The fact that the more you use them lends to them becoming worse quality overtime is a big reason they suck.

Except cds had better audio quality, you could shuffle or skip, they didn't where out or get "eaten" by the player, there was no rewinding or having to flip the tapes over, you could install cd changers in your car so you wouldnt have to swap discs around, and there was still no preventing you from recording a cd onto a cassette if you wanted. My old boombox could bootleg that shit easy as could be.

No one in or out of the industry wanted to keep cassettes. By comparison, they were trash.

It's the letter of the law: media shifting is legal in some places where downloading a copy from an unofficial site is not. Also, there are people out there who would not have the first idea where to look for an existing rip.

...unless its very obscure stuff.

That's primarily why you'd be ripping stuff. There is so much stuff only available on VHS and DVD.

Most rips tend to apply some compression. Ripping them yourself will generally give you a better result unless you also intend to compress them.

I’m not sure what you were trying, but this works for me:

Never use hardware encoding. That is intended for real time transcoding. There are not many settings that work since it is just sending the file to the video card and letting it do its thing.

Slower is better. If you set the software encoder to very slow it will produce an output that is very high quality per megabyte. I generally don’t care if it takes twice as long to encode it as to watch it. I queue it up and let it run over night.

Choose the right codec. I like 10 bit HEVC, because I know it will work on the clients I play it from. When you rip a DVD using MakeMKV, the video will be MPEG-2, it was designed in the 1990’s and converting the file to a modern codec will save a lot of space. I don’t reencode 4K UHD rips much since I don’t want to mess with losing the hdr or other color features that I like in watching those files.

Audio tracks: I will rip out audio for languages I don’t speak, or desctiptive audio track, but go out of my way to label things like director commentaries. I don’t reencode the audio tracks at all, you won’t save much disk space by messing with them compared to the video tracks.

Same.