DVDFab:Backup DVD of TV season to hard disk

[zervakos]

Hello,

I would like to accomplish to following:

- Backup DVD's of TV series that I purchased to my hard disk.

- I would like to have one file per DVD, could be VOB, I just would like to have a copy, nothing more.

- Upon viewing this file, everything would be the same as if I was watching the original DVD, the menus appear and work, etc.

I have tried the following:

- Selected the Full Disc option under DVD to DVD and used my hard drive as the target. This resulted in multiple ~1GB files.

- Selected the VOB option under DVD to Mobile. Each title becomes a file if I select all the titles to be ripped.

For the particular DVD I'm trying to rip, I see the DVD has 21 indivdual titles. I guess my basic question is this:

Is there a way to rip the DVD so that I just have one ~4GB file of the DVD's content that behaves just like the optical media upon viewing from the hard drive?

I must admit I feel a bit overwhelmed with all of the options available to me in DVDFab, but I think that what I'm trying to accomplish should be pretty simple.

thanks

[AGJ]

you can always save as an ISO file it one file and has all extras and menus intact as well. instead of saving file to hard drive you save it as ISO and that the paper icon with disc next to target. Check out the highlighted part of the attachment on how to do that

[zervakos]

Thanks for the quick response. I just tried it and now I get an error message saying my C: drive doesn't have enough space despite pointing the output file to my E: drive which certainly does have the space.

Is there somewhere in the settings of DVDFab that I'm not seeing where it wants to use the C: drive as a temporary drive?

[AGJ]

go into common settings and change the temp folder directory as it saves to c drive while it is doing conversion and needs to be changed if you not have enough room on it

[zervakos]

Forgive me, I must be blind because I can't find the setting to change the C: drive path for temporary data. I have a window entitled Common Settings. Along the left I have a pane with many options to expand, Info, General, DVD/Blu-Ray, etc. It is here that I am looking and sadly failing to find the option to change the temporary working directory.

[zervakos]

Never mind, I found it. Need to highlight General and there it is on the right side.

[signals]

If you explore a DVD disc with windows you will see that the VOB files are broken up into 1GB chunks just as they are if you tell DVDFab to write your backup to a VIDEO_TS folder on your hard drive instead of burning it to an optical disc. It will still play as if it were one file with most player software that will play a DVD disc if you tell it to play from folder or play from hard drive.

[zervakos]

Interesting, you are right about that. And all along I thought DVDFab was breaking apart the files. Is there any advantage to having multiple VOB files vs. a single ISO file in terms of quality? I successfully made an ISO copy of a DVD that has a TV show on it, works just like the DVD, however, I noticed that the quality was not as good as the original DVD for some reason. I was under the impression that an ISO is a byte by byte copy of the original. Maybe it's my hardware?

I'm trying again with multiple VOB files to see how it would work. The main impetus behind all of this is twofold. One is to have all of my optical media backed up. The other is to have all of my optical media available over the network and accessible in as simple a manner as possible for other members of my family. I have network attached storage on my network and a home theatre PC connected to my flat panel TV with a bluetooth mouse so the convenience of being able to click on a network share and watch any title without having to swap out optical media is very appealing...

[GregiBoy]

To ensure that you have the same quality as the original DVD, make sure that you are selecting DVD9, not DVD5 as the default size, otherwise Fab will compress the copy to the hard disk with a resultant drop in quality.

As someone that has been streaming media across my network for at least the last 5 years with over 1000 video titles and 30,000 audio tracks in my media library, there are a couple of things that you should investigate and research.

1. Most NAS's come with a DNLA media server installed such as Twonky. This makes management and streaming of your media far easier.

2. Most of us tend to encode video titles to either AVI or MP4 format with a space saving of around 4:1 with very little, if any, drop in quality although this is subjective and you need to try it and see what works for you.

This can be achieved using Fab's "DVD to Mobile" function and have a read of my "Best Practice" thread which has a link in my signature.

[signals]

Interesting, you are right about that. And all along I thought DVDFab was breaking apart the files. Is there any advantage to having multiple VOB files vs. a single ISO file in terms of quality? I successfully made an ISO copy of a DVD that has a TV show on it, works just like the DVD, however, I noticed that the quality was not as good as the original DVD for some reason. I was under the impression that an ISO is a byte by byte copy of the original. Maybe it's my hardware?

I'm trying again with multiple VOB files to see how it would work. The main impetus behind all of this is twofold. One is to have all of my optical media backed up. The other is to have all of my optical media available over the network and accessible in as simple a manner as possible for other members of my family. I have network attached storage on my network and a home theatre PC connected to my flat panel TV with a bluetooth mouse so the convenience of being able to click on a network share and watch any title without having to swap out optical media is very appealing...

The video quality is identical--the ISO file is just formatted as it would be to be burned onto a disc. There is some file system and other overhead that makes the ISO slightly larger than the VIDEO_TS folder alone and it takes a few minutes longer to create. Most player software prefers the VIDEO_TS folder. You should consider Gregiboy's suggestion of making AVI or MP4 files for better results if you are going to stream them over a network since the bitrate is much lower. But I would not consider those file types as being 100% equal in quality to the original MPEG-2 video contained on a DVD and personally would not use them for archival backups.

[zervakos]

Thanks for all your help guys. GregiBoy was right about the DVD5 vs. DVD9. I changed the default to DVD9 and now I'm getting an exact copy which is what I was looking to do all along. I think I'll just make each DVD I have into an ISO and use the file system hierarchy to sort the seasons.

I figure storage is cheap enough and I can always look to compress down the road from the ISO's I'll be making as I imagine it takes some tinkering to get the recipe right.