• The Mac-Forums Community Guidelines (linked at the top of every forum) are very clear, we respect US law and court precedence when it comes to legality of activity.

    Therefore to clarify:
    • You may not discuss breaking DVD or BluRay encryption, copying, or "ripping" commercial, copy-protected DVDs.
    • This includes DVDs or BluRays you own. Even if you own the DVD or BluRay, it is still technically illegal under the DMCA to break the encryption. While some may argue otherwise, until the law is rewritten or the US Supreme Court strikes it down, we will adhere to the current intent of the law.
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Back up my DVDs

T

todd51

Guest
Ok, so I've decided to start on a new task, which will be backing up all of my DVDs to my iMacs HDD. Some of them are getting a few scratches in them, and I would like to have playable digital backups. I'm about a quarter of the way through them, when I started thinking I might be using a wrong format.

Right now I have been encoding them as a .mp4 file for some Quicktime playback. However, I'm wondering if I should be using .mkv instead? Can anyone help me decided. I want pretty good audio/video quality and the files around around 2-3Gb right now as .mp4 files.
 
Kash

Kash


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.mkv is just a container format, it's not a codec. Basically, you can have multiple video, audio, picture, or subtitle tracks inside a single file. It's primary use is to include subtitles with the video.

h.264 is probably your best bet for getting a good size/quality ratio. What program are you using?

Oh and of course, this is all under the assumption that you're ripping non-commercial DVDs :)
 

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