Keeping your DVD collection safe from scratches and curious +children fingers while still having it available when you want to see a +movie is not straight forward. My preferred method at the moment is +to store a full copy of the ISO on a hard drive, and use VLC, Popcorn +Hour or other useful players to view the resulting file. This way the +subtitles and bonus material are still available and using the ISO is +just like inserting the original DVD record in the DVD player.
+ +Earlier I used dd for taking security copies, but it do not handle +DVDs giving read errors (which are quite a few of them). I've also +tried using +dvdbackup +and genisoimage, but these days I use the marvellous python library +and program +python-dvdvideo +written by Bastian Blank. It is +in Debian +already and the binary package name is python3-dvdvideo. Instead +of trying to read every block from the DVD, it parses the file +structure and figure out which block on the DVD is actually in used, +and only read those blocks from the DVD. This work surprisingly well, +and I have been able to almost backup my entire DVD collection using +this method.
So far, python-dvdvideo have failed on between 10 and +20 DVDs, which is a small fraction of my collection. The most common +problem is +DVDs +using UTF-16 instead of UTF-8 characters, which according to +Bastian is against the DVD specification (and seem to cause some +players to fail too). A rarer problem is what seem to be inconsistent +DVD structures, as the python library +claim +there is a overlap between objects. An equally rare problem claim +some +value is out of range. No idea what is going on there. I wish I +knew enough about the DVD format to fix these, to ensure my movie +collection will stay with me in the future. + +So, if you need to keep your DVDs safe, back them up using +python-dvdvideo. :)
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