Burning DVDs to digital

[Anonymous]

I have a case full of DVDs that I want to convert to digital files. Not really interested in doing it myself. Any recommendations on who could do this for me?

[Anonymous]

If these are copyrighted Hollywood films, then no one could legally do it for you. That rules out any official services. You're better off asking friends if they know someone. I did my entire collection, and it was definitely a pain but it was worth it.

[Anonymous]

It is a trivial process. You stick the DVD in, open the ripping software, and let it run for a few minutes. Then rinse and repeat. I would ask a the high school kid next door. Offer them somewhere between $2-5 a DVD. Give them the case of DVDs and a USB drive.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If these are copyrighted Hollywood films, then no one could legally do it for you. That rules out any official services. You're better off asking friends if they know someone. I did my entire collection, and it was definitely a pain but it was worth it.

I'm not confident that this is true. I believe it is legal to burn DVDs to your computer for your own personal use. Now, you may find that professionals are unwilling to do it for you because it opens them up to liability if you go ahead and start sharing them. But I believe you're within the letter of the law to do this.

[Anonymous]

As a point of clarification: DVDs are already digital and contain files on them. Unless OP wants to make more DVDs, he wants to "rip" existing DVDs, not "burn" more of them. There is lots of software to do this, both free and paid. I can personally recommend makemkv, but there are other options as well. You might need to jump through some hoops if you want to maintain multiple subtitle tracks, "bonus" features, etc., or if you need to deal with multiple regions and/or convert from PAL to NTSC.

Agreed with paying the kid down the street to do this. As noted above, commercial services generally won't deal with commercial releases. And the kid down the street will probably do a better job, anyway. Note that the file sizes are likely to be large; a full DVD is roughly 4-8GB of data, depending upon whether it is a single-layer a double-layer disk. Blu-Rays are 25-50GB.

Once you have done this, keep the original disks as backups, since you probably don't want to manage regular backups of this size, anyway.

[Anonymous]

Handbrake.