Ripping Blu-rays Worthwhile?

[stonesfan187]

Hello all, I am wondering if ripping and compressing my Blu-rays would be worthwhile. I have quite a few discs so this would take some time. I would be ripping then compressing them through a program like VidCoder using NVENC H265. I find that I am okay with slightly worse quality as a tradeoff for fast encoding. My playback hardware doesn't have any trouble with the files I would be creating. Has anyone else done this? My plan is to rip/compress everything onto an 8tb HDD and then when my parents are up or something where they want to watch my movies, they don't handle the actual discs themselves and no risk of damage. I just think about how much longer they'll even keep making Blu-rays.

Would I be better off just trying to sell these and get copies on a service like VUDU or iTunes instead? I keep saying to myself I want to go that route, then a movie comes out that I like and I want to own it and I get the Blu-ray. Thanks.

[Anonymous5394]

The eternal question! I'd keep them mate. I used to think like you and keep digital versions of films on 2 or more hard drives. Only to find unluckily(2 of the identical content!) said hard drives failed losing my films, but I either had a scratched hard copy left which wouldn't transcode, sold it, or just couldn't find it anymore- meaning lost it after moving home! Now I make sure those DVD's, Blu's etc are kept in pristine condition with a back up copy of the original under fairuse rules to ensure at least a modicum of protection. You never know when you need em!

Digital copies, downloads are prone to corruption, deletion, but I suppose ripping your stuff and transcode the films to a good compression format on the maximum storage disc available using crf would be a good idea as well as copying the original itself without compression to be safe. Im not sure how many films would go on a disc though!