On Copying DVDs to a Hard Drive
A recent post on アニ・ノート brings up the topic of copying DVDs to ones hard drive. Actually, I’ve copied some DVDs to my laptop recently, to watch while I’m staying in San Diego for Comic-Con.
Considering that a 1TB external hard drive is certain to fall below $100 in the US within a year and a half (two years, tops, with 1TB internal hard drives reaching that point in less time), now’s as good a time as any to look into backing up those DVDs, spending many hours copying them, and hoping the hard drive doesn’t die soon after. (Maybe it’s best to test out a hard drive for a few months before relying on it.)
There are two simple methods for Linux (and *BSD, etc.) users to copy a DVD to their hard drive. The easiest is to go straight to the command prompt:
$ cat /dev/dvd > mao_chan_vol_1.iso
What can be more simple that that, I must say.
While I, myself, enjoy the command-line method, another way about it is to use K3B:
Simply select “Copy DVD”, and set it to “only create image”…
…and K3B is ready to copy a DVD in high spirits.
Should anything happen to the DVD, a copy is available, so you can feel safe.
And what about watching those DVD ISOs?
VideoLAN Client has no problems with a DVD’s ISO. Simply open and watch. (That’s what I’d suggest for Author, rather than tearing the files apart in mplayer.)
My player of choice, Xine, on the other hand, needs a little more effort, as far as I know. From a console, run Xine, and tell it to play a DVD, giving the path to the ISO, and it’ll be playing those DVDs in a cute manner in no time.
My fourth viewing of Ground Defense Force! Mao-chan, while in San Diego next week, will require no DVD swapping. Now to see if I can finish up the post I started writing about the series last year, and see how far I can get on two more posts inspired by this series which I have yet to start…
For CDs, I the programmer rip those as FLAC files. (Some Ground Defense Force! Mao-chan references really require a stretch to fit into a post…)
On the topic of backing-up DVDs to avoid the DVD hassle, I simply store the DVDs in a CD folder and put the DVD cases in a big box.
It works for me.
December 5th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Christopher, I cannot find your e-mail anywhere, so here’s a comment. As it turned out, some DVDs cannot be copied as an image. The dd will bail with EIO after about ~760KB. DearS v.1 and Midori no Hibi v.1 are like that, for instance. Copying VOBs from a mounted UDF gives the same error. However, mplayer has no trouble dumping VOBs.
December 6th, 2008 at 8:38 am
That’s interesting. I wonder what kind of copy protection they may possibly have on them. I’d try dd’ing them on a different computer if you haven’t already. What about using K3b (which may very well be a front end for dd, I really don’t know)?
And, yes, I need to redo the layout of links on this site one of these years, so my about page is linked to again.