One of the best tools for preserving your physical media is Handbrake, a free toolkit for video conversion, DVD, and Blu-ray ripping. Handbrake works with Windows, macOS, and Linux, and this guide will show you how to rip a DVD simply and easily. We’ll be using a Windows 11 PC for this how-to.
The humble Digital Versatile Disc, DVD, has been with us since the 1990s, and while it may not offer the clarity of Blu-ray, it is cheap and plentiful. Go into any thrift store, dollar store, yard sale, or charity shop, and you will find a plethora of DVDs, often at bargain prices. In the age of streaming, where your favorite series or movie can move from one service to another, or even cease to exist, ripping DVDs is the best way to archive what you want to watch. Not what an algorithm thinks you want to watch.
Backing up your DVD collection is also useful, given that “bit rot” — where the aluminum layer of the discs flakes away — is common in older discs. If your discs are not stored in a temperature-controlled environment (your loft/attic gets warm in the summer and cold in the winter) or you just happen to have a bad disc, your collection will disintegrate inside its cases.
Ripping DVDs with Handbrake is a simple process that lets you watch your DVD collection on all your digital devices and archive them on a NAS or file server.
Preserving your DVD library is essential as bit rot damages countless discs, making them unreadable.
Our favorite shows are at the mercy of streaming services, which can remove underperforming shows or those for which it no longer holds a license with little notice.
Before we can rip any DVDs in Handbrake, we first need to install libdvdcss. Libdvdcss provides a library for accessing DVDs as if they were a block device. I remember installing libdvdcss on many Linux machines, but I’ve never had to do so on Windows until today.
Download and install Handbrake for Windows. Download libdvdcss for Handbrake Copy the .dll to your Handbrake installation. For me, this was C:\Program Files\HandBrake Open Handbrake.
The structure of a DVD disc
Essentially, a DVD is really just a video disc full of video files. It is organized into a hierarchy that uses terms such as “title” and “chapter,” but what are they?
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