I’m looking to make a complete backup of my family’s DVD and CD libraries by turning them into plain unencrypted media files that can just be played by whatever software. And I just might create torrents for some of the ones that don’t already have established highly seeded torrents.

Except, I’ve been trying all day on and off get a DVD ripper with automatic decryption set up on my machine and can’t figure it out. I use Fedora, and none of the ones I read about are on the standard package manager, probably because Fedora doesn’t want to get sued. I have tried the source code for the major ones but again, they have next to no official or even unofficial documentation, need dependencies which I can’t figure out where to get, or the compile or run crashes with cryptic errors, or errors out when . Web searching has been less than helpful with any of these problems.

Has anyone here gotten a decrypting DVD ripper working on Linux? Can you share what steps you took, or what documentation/tutorial you followed? I really don’t want to have to use Windows or proprietary software for this, because for the former, it’s… Windows, and for the latter, I don’t trust it because piracy software can be shady AF.

  • @mrshll1001
    link
    41 year ago

    I’m not sure what ones you’ve read about, but for me the standard stack for DVD ripping was always ffmpeg and Handbrake. I’ve recently done this successfully on Debian. I’d be surprised if Fedora didn’t have either of these in the repos, but I also found this article explaining how to do this.

    If Handbrake is struggling to read the DVD from the drive, I find it’s also possible to create an ISO file of the DVD via dd and then point Handbrake at it; Handbrake can take it from there.