With the upgrade to F11 I've discovered that when I install a dvd gnome automatically mounts it with an option (right click on the desktop icon) for copying the DVD to an iso image. The ISO is typically 4-8GB which is roughly 3-4 times the size of the avi files I've been creating with AcidRip. The thing about ripping to AVI files is the time. A typical rip can take an hour or more. Copying the DVD to an ISO takes about 20 minutes.
GNOME uses a tool called Brasero to copy the images. It doesn't work on all DVDs, however. In the first batch of about 20 or so movies I ran into a few that failed the copy. It's unclear why they failed, but using
also failed. I suspect the DVDs are damaged but that may not be the case.
Considering how prices have fallen for disk space I've decided to rerip my video archives into DVD ISO images. MythTV will play these (as will Xine and mplayer) including the menus and all the nice added features. This means my wife and daughter might be more tempted to use the mythtv client I've connected to our main TV (which has a VGA input, making it very easy to use the client with the TV).
It's a long process to get them all redone this way and I still don't have enough disk space for them all, but I think this makes better sense than ripping to AVI. It's faster and it gets all the features from the original DVD. Now I can keep the DVDs safely stored and use them only if something happens to the disks.
not "damaged" but intentional bad sectors as copy protection – look for ignore error options and setup a raid array to take the extra storage ;-)
I hate raid arrays. I’ve worked on them for years and they never seemed to do what I needed them to do. So I skip ’em. But now I have a collection of external USB-connected big drives. Each is mounted under /movies as “Cinema-1”, “Cinema-2”, etc. I stuff all the ISO’s on those. Works great with MythVideo.
As for Brasero and the “bad sectors” issue, they may have fixed that up themselves, at least on Fedora 14 which is what I’m running now. I find very few DVDs that can’t be ripped now, though the few that don’t I’ll try using your suggestion. Many thanks!