DVD Backup

Saturday, 29 September, 2012

Every so often I want to backup a DVD or portion of a DVD from a disc and need a simple solution to do it (ideally open source!). So it’s worth recapping the two stages needed:

1. Copy the files from the disc: they are encrypted so you need software that will decrypt them (and sometimes merge the multiple VOBs to a single file). You can do this with DVDShrink which helpfully runs portable. If you select the reauthor option then you can clip on the section you want to grab. If your disc is partially damaged this won’t work so another option is to install DVD43 which actually intercepts Windows file calls to the DVD player and then decrypts the files on the fly which means your software in step 2 should work

2. Author the files to your desired format. DVDShrink can compress the files for you or you can use something like MPEG Stream Clip to do the same thing. This would also allow you to demux if you just wanted the audio or video.