Having spent the last 5-10? years (I lost track of time) ripping all my music, I'm now looking at doing the same for my DVDs. They are all 20+ years old so predate HD DVD. Having watch a couple on my PC the picture quality is not great so I'm looking to avoid as much compression as possible.
Any advice on ripping software and file formats would be very useful at this point because the more I read the less sure I am about what to use.
As the CSS encryption was cracked decades ago, you can do a bit-perfect backup of a DVD's content with many tools.
The compression of the video is MPEG2 and there are various audio formats, with AC3 (Dolby Digital) being the most common, DTS being less common and MPEG1 L2 (MP2/MUSICAM) audio being fairly rare.
It's quite common to rip to Matroska format (.MKV).
As to recommendations of DVD ripping tools for Windows, I'm afraid I can't help as I've only ever done it under Linux.
If hard drive space is at a premium, re-encoding to a more recent video format, (eg. H.264) can be done, but you'll have the flaws of both the original compression and the newer compression schemes.
Thanks for that. I have 12TB of storage which I hope will suffice. I've just unpacked the first box and counted 180 DVDs. There are another 13 boxes so that's around 2,500 titles to rip.
Matroska seems to be the preferred choice from what I've read and it appears to support cover art attachments which is a big plus for me. It also seems to be supported by JRiver Media Center which is a another bonus.