There comes a point in every DVDs life where it just doesn't play properly anymore. Scratches on the disk cause skipped frames and image corruption and no amount of cleaning will fix the problem. What are you to do? The solution is to backup your DVD before it becomes completely unplayable.

Now you might have been fooled into believing that this is illegal or at the very least immoral. I'm not going to debate that - if you want to let a scratched DVD fail on you and have to buy it again it's up to you. What I will do here is to show you how you can probably save yourself the expense of purchasing a DVD a second time. Let me make one thing very clear before we continue. I do not condone using this information to make copies of DVDs to give away or sell to other people. While I might strongly disagree with the tactics being employed by the film producers they do, at the end of the day, own the copyright on the work they produce and can therefore place whatever restrictions they want on it.

Linux is awash with utilities that will rip and transcode DVD's for you. Some are highly complex command line only utilites such as "transcoder" and others are GUI "wrapper" application (a wrapper application is one that only provides a front end to other applications). I will focus on two wrapper applications here since they will almost certainly cover everything you want to do with a DVD.

Backing Up a DVD to a DVD

If you want to copy a DVD to antoher DV, in other words keep the format the same, then K9Copy is probably the easiest tool under Linux. If you are familiar with the Windows utility DVDShrink this is similar. What this application does is read selected tracks from a source DVD and, if necessary, recompress the video stream so that it fits on to your target media which is typically a DVD5 disk (you can get double layer, DVD9, writable disks now but they aren't readable by all DVD drives).

Insert the DVD you wish to copy and select your DVD drive as the input in K9. Press the Open button to read the title information from the disk, the titles will appear in the tree below the input / output selectors. Select the title set or title sets you want to backup. The main feature is typically the largest and first title set. If you wish select an individual title and note the shrink factor. A larger shrink factor means a lower quality but anything below 1.5 is hardly noticable.You can tweak the shrinkage factor on a title by title basis and thereby giving more space to the titles you care about although usually this is more hassle than it's worth.

You can either burn the results of your extraction straight to another DVD or, my preferred method, is to create an ISO file and then burn that with K3B. Select ISO as the output device and press copy. Press copy, select a file to save the ISO into and sit back and relax. On my machine it takes about 30 minutes to rip, shrink and create the iso file.

Backing Up a DVD to another Format

Use DVD::Rip