So I recently got my Hands on an old Panasonic Toughbook (CF 30) that has a DVD player (it is the only device that is capable of reading Dvds that i own) and now I want to digitalise some of the movies I still got laying around. I gave Handbrake a shot, but it didnt work for me, so now I want to know your recommendations for ripping from DVDs. The thing with that Laptop is, that Its about 19 Years old and still runs on 32 bits, so keep that in mind (I’m running Debian 11.7)
Well hold on.
You say you used Handbrake, which is about as anyone’s go-to to rip DVDs as MakeMKV is, and you didn’t exactly explain what went wrong. Because I refuse to believe that program simply just not working without what caused it to. Did you look up what settings you need to set it to rip the DVD by?
I like MakeMKV. It also works flawlessly with modern formats like (4k-)BluRays. Also it’s super simple to use. Just throw your disk in, press the big shiny button and wait till it rips your disk. It even handles the decryption for you.
And it runs fine in a VM.
I have 3 external DVD drives - VM’s were the only way to use all 3 on a single machine. Really reduces rip times when I have a stack of discs.
Unless your models have weird drivers you absolutely can have multiple disc drives
Try installing libdvdcss or libdvdcss2. That may make Handbrake work correctly.
Past that, VLC also supports pulling content from DVDs, though it again uses libdvdcss. MakeMKV is probably the easiest option to use, though it will only extract the video/audio content and won’t preserve menus and the like.
Quite honestly though this is one of the things where the bulk of the best tools are Windows-based. The original DVD Decrypter is still rock solid for most DVDs, and anything it can’t handle you can usually get with DVDFab HD Decrypter or AnyDVD. All of those have pretty bare bones minimum system requirements, so your laptop should be able to run 'em. Whether you can do it via Wine/etc. or need to use a Windows VM I can’t tell you, but that’d be where I’d go.
MakeMKV has worked well for me. I was using it on a 10 year old PC until I recently upgraded.
easiest way is to use the convert option in VLC
That works well if you’re OK with using default options, not very user friendly the second you want to tweak stuff.
I use ddrescue to create an ISO file and I play that file with VLC. Usually you can navigate the original menus without a problem.
Do you want to keep the original file size or reduce it?
It’s possible to compress with minimal quality loss by transcoding (since you can switch from the old inefficient DVD codec to a modern one). But just ripping the ISO image of the disc is the easiest thing you can do and it preserves the original perfectly, so if you have enough disc space you could start with that and maybe compress later if you start to run out of space
