this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
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https://www.dvdshrink.org/
https://www.makemkv.com/
https://handbrake.fr/
There are so many high quality rips out there. Bothering to rip these yourself makes not much sense, unless its very obscure stuff.
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.
And a mix of available copies/qualities are better.
I don't know the situation in all of the countries, but the ones I know that allow you to make a copy of what you purchased also require that in making a copy you are not allowed to break any DRM. I don't think there are many media being sold that do not include some kind of DRM these days.
Edit: agree that people may not know how to pirate stuff but ripping something in decent enough quality also requires quite specialist knowledge.
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.
Obi-Wan meme: That’s why I’m here
What about Linux? I'm a recent conver that was used to makemkv
Makemkv supports linux, works great on linux to. https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=224
I love me some MakeMKV and Linux…..sucks it’s in Russia. Oh well, thanks Mike!
Handbrake works.
I thought I needed makemkv to put it in handbrake. Have I been doing it wrong?
I’m on Debian. I just apt install handbrake and it worked. If it was a dependency, it was automatically installed.
Handbrake can handle DVDs directly; you'll need Make MKV for Blu-Rays.
I'm a fan of ARM. https://github.com/automatic-ripping-machine/automatic-ripping-machine
I run it in a podman container, passing my BluRay drive though. It rips automatically, and attempts to even lookup the metadata for the disk to file it properly. It's not perfect, but it does work quite well. The only issue I have with it is it does a poor job on TV shows, but I've found nothing better, so it is good enough for me.
I gave up encoding with handbrake. It looks much worse after the fact 99% of the time, no matter which settings I use.
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.
Be sure to use constant quality mode too. Set the RF to around 16-18 for SD video when using x264 or x265. The lower you set it, the higher the quality is.
De-telecine: default De-interlace detection: default De-interlace: decomb
Video encoding: x265 10bit (don’t use NVENC, Intel, or AMD hardware encode)
Preset: slow
Quality rate factor: 16
The above should be suitable for most DVDs and yields good results of 1/4 to 1/2 the size going from MPEG2 to HEVC.