oe7drt-website/content/posts/2024/63-moving-my-dvds-to-the-media-server/index.md

---
title: Moving my DVDs to the media server
summary:
  My homeserver serves my old video files via DLNA. I decided to dump all my
  DVDs to the video share.
date: 2024-02-08T19:49:36+0100
#lastmod:
categories:
  - computerstuff
tags:
  - dvd
  - selfhost
  - unraid
  - dlna
---

Let's go a little bit back in time, shall we? Some day in 2005ish. We don't use USB sticks or
SSDs to backup our data, we still store most of our shit on CD-ROMs or even DVD-RWs (or ROMS).
Whatever.

What I actually want to say: let's backup some (or all) of my old DVD movies. I have a box full
of DVSs in my basement and I wanted to push them all to my homeserver -- so I could watch them
on the big TV screen because I don't have a DVD player (or similar) any more.

But music and video industry did not make it easy for us. They added super-duper-fancy
copy-protection to their DVDs because people cloned them and gave them to other people these days.

Anyone still remember these tools, like _CloneCD_, _ClonyXXL_, _Alcohol120%_ etc. Some also let
you emulate your cloned files so you did not have to let them in your CD-ROM drive. That was quite
handy when you played computer games, because these games required you to let the CD-ROM/DVD in
your drive at all time (which was sometimes annoying because of the spinnning disk).

But the actual topic is the cloning of these old DVDs. I started today, and got copied about
6 DVDs without problems and then: _"Kiss kiss bang bang"_ -- damn, what is that? The DVD drive
went like crazy and the ripping software (I use [Handbrake](https://handbrake.fr/) in this case)
was like dead.

I already installed the package _libdvdcss_ at that point, the first DVDs went just fine without it.
_libdvdcss_ lets you read copy-protected DVDs. But still, _Handbrake_ did not like it either.

It is [dvdbackup](https://dvdbackup.sourceforge.net/)s turn now. I cloned the main movie to a local
directory and told Handbrake to open that folder then. It worked! But:

There was no movie with 1h or 2h play time. There were 5 20 minutes movies with 2 audio streams
(english, german) -- the first small movie had the german audio track as first stream, the other
had the german track as second stream.

So here is what I did: rip all of them separately and concatenate them later with _ffmpeg_ into one
big file. That sucked because I copied them with both audio tracks and when I put them together later,
the audio streams were swapping in the middle of the video -- so I ripped them only with one audio
stream, the german one -- which I identified before with _mpv_.

## What can we do on the command line

### DVD with no copy-protection

Mount the DVD to a folder

```console
$ mount mnt/dvd
```

That is easy, because I made the following entry in my `/etc/fstab` file:

```fstab
/dev/cdrom     /home/dominic/mnt/dvd   auto   ro,user,noauto,unhide  0 0
```

Open _Handbrake_ and select the dvd folder as source. There is usually a looong chapter, select it
and configure the output format to the desired format, add or modify the audio tracks and maybe
the subtitles and you're good to go.

### DVD with copy-protection

Most of the time, _Handbrake_ will not respond or feel like hanging...

Clone the main title of the DVD to another directory on a local filesystem.

```console
$ dvdbackup -i /dev/sr0 -F -v -o OutputFolder
```

Select _OutputFolder_ as your source in _Handbrake_.

You may have to rip multiple small movies, save them to some directory. Once finished, open
that directory in a terminal window and put them together.

```console
$ ffmpeg -i VTS_03_1.mp4 -i VTS_03_2.mp4 -i VTS_03_3.mp4 -i VTS_03_4.mp4 \
  -filter_complex "[0:v][0:a][1:v][1:a][2:v][2:a][3:v][3:a]concat=n=4:v=1:a=1" OutputMovie.mp4
```

I had to do this with a 5-parts movie:

```console
$ ffmpeg -i fin_1.mp4 -i fin_2.mp4 -i fin_3.mp4 -i fin_4.mp4 -i fin_5.mp4 \
  -filter_complex "[0:v][0:a][1:v][1:a][2:v][2:a][3:v][3:a][4:v][4:a]concat=n=5:v=1:a=1" \
  -vsync vfr Kiss.Kiss.Bang.Bang.2006.DVDRip.de.mp4
```

They say, you should use `-vsync vfr` when the framerate of the individual parts is way off.

## End result

Now, that I ripped about 40 DVDs, I'm glad that it's over...

I had to skip about 8 other DVDs because I wasn't able to read them -- having the DVD drive
spinning up until it stops and begins again with spinning up until it stops...

Crazy copy-protection I guess. I will rip them the old way, maybe a video capture card will help.

What to do with bought videos on Amazon Prime or Youtube etc.?

What might work: having [OBS studio](https://obsproject.com/) that records off a virtual screen
on which the pop-out player of Firefox runs in fullscreen mode. But: that will need some more
investigation -- I'm pretty sure those bastards will have some anti-download clauses in their
license agreements.

For the sake of completeness: I'm using [miniDLNA](https://sourceforge.net/projects/minidlna/)
in my network. It feels like three times more responsive than my old Synology DS918+ (yes, it
runs on way better hardware).