Rip DVDs with multiple drives

[tfor]

Hello,

I have a few hundreds of DVDs that I want to rip to a hard drive.
Therefore I am looking for a software that is able to rip from several DVD drives at the same time with a minimum of user intervention. It does not neeed to be freeware, I am willing to pay for it.
The ideal solution would simply rip an inserted disk automatically to a file called <discname>.ISO

I have been browsing through the forum for some time but I did not find an answer.

Cheers,

[hech54]

Hello,

I have a few hundreds of DVDs that I want to rip to a hard drive.
Therefore I am looking for a software that is able to rip from several DVD drives at the same time with a minimum of user intervention. It does not neeed to be freeware, I am willing to pay for it.
The ideal solution would simply rip an inserted disk automatically to a file called <discname>.ISO

I have been browsing through the forum for some time but I did not find an answer.

Cheers,

DUMB idea.

[hello_hello]

If it's not enough there's generally someone giving advice not to convert video in the forum dedicated to video conversion, you can always be advised not to rip your DVDs in the forum dedicated to DVD ripping. I might see if I can register with a forum dedicated to car restoration later on and tell people to buy new cars instead. Maybe it's fun.

AnyDVD will rip from more than one drive simultaneously. I think I've only ripped 2 simultaneously with AnyDVD itself, but as I usually convert the video after ripping, I use AnyDVD in the background to do the decrypting when needed and DVDShrink for ripping while re-authoring. It requires multiple instances of DVDShrink but only one instance of AnyDVD and I've ripped four at a time on many occasions that way, so I'd imagine AnyDVD itself should be able to rip as many as you have drives simultaneously.

I'm not sure about the automatic ripping part. At worst you'll need to click on the system tray icon after inserting a disc and tell AnyDVD to rip. Or you might be able to make it a little more auto with something like this. http://code.google.com/p/anydvd-rip-wrapper/

[ndjamena]

Well, it would be a good idea to determine what, exactly the purpose is before giving advice. Most people are moving away from ISOs, is there an actual reason that's the intended output format?

(I started off ripping entire discs... that idea lasted about a month or so, and it does seem like a rather daft method now.)

[tfor]

If it's not enough there's generally someone giving advice not to convert video in the forum dedicated to video conversion, you can always be advised not to rip your DVDs in the forum dedicated to DVD ripping. I might see if I can register with a forum dedicated to car restoration later on and tell people to buy new cars instead. Maybe it's fun.

AnyDVD will rip from more than one drive simultaneously. I think I've only ripped 2 simultaneously with AnyDVD itself, but as I usually convert the video after ripping, I use AnyDVD in the background to do the decrypting when needed and DVDShrink for ripping while re-authoring. It requires multiple instances of DVDShrink but only one instance of AnyDVD and I've ripped four at a time on many occasions that way, so I'd imagine AnyDVD itself should be able to rip as many as you have drives simultaneously.

I'm not sure about the automatic ripping part. At worst you'll need to click on the system tray icon after inserting a disc and tell AnyDVD to rip. Or you might be able to make it a little more auto with something like this. http://code.google.com/p/anydvd-rip-wrapper/

Thanks a lot, hello_hello.
I will try AnyDVD, fortunately there is a trial license to evaluate the solution.
I know of course that storing MPEG2 data is not very efficient but I want to keep the files untouched for now and I can always convert them into something else later. The job has to be done quite quickly and ripping plus encoding would simply last too long on my old CPU.

[redwudz]

When I converted my DVD collection to MKV, I ripped 4 DVDs at the same time with AnyDVD HD.
You could probably do more, depending on how many optical drives you have.
I do the same with Blu-rays. It still took me about 2 days to rip all my DVDs to a couple of hard drives.

I use MKV (H.264/AC3) as it's more compact, and with the correct settings, little quality loss. The main movie files take up about 2GB per DVD.
If there are extras I really want easy access to, I convert them also. But I still have the original DVDs, so I can always load them for the extras.

[lingyi]

Well, it would be a good idea to determine what, exactly the purpose is before giving advice. Most people are moving away from ISOs, is there an actual reason that's the intended output format?

(I started off ripping entire discs... that idea lasted about a month or so, and it does seem like a rather daft method now.)

ISO is a container and when ripping a full DVD (or Blu-Ray) it contains an EXACT copy of the disc, less any copy protection if present. Menus, movie and extras maintain the same structure and functionality they had on the original disc. In addition, an ISO can be easily burned to a new disc which is an EXACT copy of the original.

I'm not too familiar with non-Asian releases, but many Asian DVDs have Special Editions with an extra disc or two with multiple extras (making of, behind the scenes, interviews, etc.) and if I don't retain the ISO, I'll have 5-10 separate video files instead of one ISO. Makes organizing my collection way easier!

[tfor]

ISO is a container and when ripping a full DVD (or Blu-Ray) it contains an EXACT copy of the disc, less any copy protection if present. Menus, movie and extras maintain the same structure and functionality they had on the original disc. In addition, an ISO can be easily burned to a new disc which is an EXACT copy of the original.

That is exactly the point.
The important thing for me is right now to invest as little time as possible to get the job done.

[drjtech]

In addition, an ISO can be easily burned to a new disc which is an EXACT copy of the original.

In addition, an ISO can be mounted as a virtual drive that appears to the system to be a physical drive. This is useful for players that can play a disc, but cannot play disc folders on a hard drive.

[techey61]

MakeMKV is another program which enables you to rip multiple DVD discs at once. Also, here is an article which offers tips on accelerating bulk DVD's digitizing process.