since I recently put all my music on my NAS drive,  I was wondering if the same can be done with dvds and Blu-ray, with hopefully no loss of quality? If so what software is recommended?

thanks.

I started doing this a few years ago with my DVDs. Was a time consuming waste of time. Stopped part way through and just torrented them instead. Might not be legal but was a hell of a lot quicker and easier.

Handbrake is good. You will probably need to add libdvdcss to get around the DVD copy protection.

You can just create an ISO of the DVDs, and probably the Blurays too but a Bluray can easily be 30Gb+. It’ll take forever if you’ve anything like a decent sized library and take up masses of space for something you’ll hardly ever look at, plus it’ll require you to defeat the copy protection on the discs which is trivial enough to do but illegal. Can you really be arsed? As above, if you’re happy breaking copyright law you’ll skip a lot of the work just torrenting. And invest in a VPN or you’ll upset your ISP.

If you have a lot of time and a spare desktop you can rip, compress and store a dvd in a few hours.

it is a dull process and at some point you will kill a hard drive and start again…

either vpn and torrent or buy an electronic version

and just torrented them instead.

Much faster and simpler….

Handbrake.

Copy a bunch of disks to your hard drive ( the quick part ) set them up to be processed by handbrake and walk away for a day or two.

MakeMKV for blurays!

I ripped all my DVDs and then converted them all (using handbrake) so that I can play them in iTunes.  That was a while ago.  They (along with everything else) sit on my NAS and play through my apple TV.   My advice:

Decide what you want to play them on first – that will determine what format you need (or don’t need) the files to be in.  It’s been a while since I looked into this, but I think if you use MKVs, you’re not actually “converting” them as such, just “repackaging” so it’s much faster.

I use Plex, but Infuse is very well regarded if you want to use an apple TV as the client – but if you are not wedded to apple, their are lots of options.

As others have said – I wouldn’t bother ripping/encoding if I was doing it again.  I would get a couple of months VPN subscription, find a decent torrent source, and just download new versions of my files in the format I wanted.  If you own the films you are downloading, I see no ethical issue with this.

MakeMKV (free key on their forum whilst in (eternal) beta).

For both DVD & BluRay.

If you want to watch on all devices, you’d need a NAS that can transcode though, but for use with Kodi or the like then mkv is superb.

I am not sure if there are mobile apps that widely support the format now but wouldn’t be surprised.

A few years ago I set up a compute cluster to handle mass ripping and encoding. To get compatibility with playback apps/device’s compared to native disk formats you will be reencoding. It takes a careful selection of handbrake parameters to achieve compatibility and quality. Single language dvds are OK. Subtitles are rendered into the encoded video rather than overlaid on playback which can be a minefield.

Blueray was marginally possible. Makemkv was key.

I had 40+GHz of processor power and this thing ran day and night generating a lot of heat but it chewed through a big collection. The key was automating the queue of jobs from ripping into encoding. I had macs (2x Mac Pro, 2x Mac mini, 1x Macbook Pro) and cluster accessible NFS, Xgrid job distribution.

If you approach it one disc at a time on a significant collection you’ll blow you brains out after the third time you’ve had to change params to get compatibility/subtitles/language and had to start all over again.

<span style=”font-size: 0.8rem;”>This is why online streaming is so popular. Consider carefully how many of those discs you’re actually going to go back to and how accessible they are on streaming services. </span>