Building My Personal Streaming Library, Part 1: Why I Started Ripping Thousands of DVDs and Blu-rays
Welcome to the start of a series about something I’ve been working on for the better part of a year: digitizing my disc collection. I’m a few thousand discs in, and I’ve learned a lot of things the hard way. My hope is that what I’ve figured out saves the next person some of the trial and error I’ve already done.
Background: I own a lot of DVDs. Literally thousands of movies and hundreds of TV shows. I’m a bit of a collector who will never give up his physical media, but I also don’t use it much anymore. I’ve been paying for streaming subscriptions because they’re more convenient than swapping discs. Over the years I tried to convert my discs to digital several times, but I always ended up doing a little bit, getting discouraged, and walking away.
This time it’s working. Most of that comes down to having a setup that lets the work happen at a reasonable pace. The steps I’m going to describe can be done on just about any Windows PC, and there are equivalent tools on Mac and Linux if that’s what you run. But I have a fairly powerful server, which means I can run three disc drives at once and have multiple scripts going in parallel. That has been a big part of keeping the project on track.
Setting expectations: ripping somewhere north of 3,000 discs is a year-long project even at my speed. The good news is that the work compounds. I’ve learned along the way, and things are moving much faster now than they were when I started. There’s also a real difference between disc formats: DVDs are the fastest, Blu-rays are slower, and 4K discs are slow enough to budget carefully around. At this moment I’ve converted every DVD I own except a few recent purchases, and nearly all of my Blu-rays. Only the 4K and 3D discs remain. And when I say “recent purchases” — there was a really good library book sale recently and I came home with over a hundred more discs to add to the pile.
Why Keep the Physical Discs?
Some people will say streaming services are great and there’s no reason to hang on to a wall of shiny plastic. I’m not convinced the current streaming model is going to last in its current form, and not everything is available on streaming anyway. More importantly, when you “buy” a digital copy of something, you’re not really buying it. You’re licensing it for as long as the service decides to keep hosting it.
I learned this the hard way. I bought a few movies on Vudu that were later removed from the service and I just lost them, no refund. Other streaming services I didn’t happen to use have shut down entirely, and people lost their entire libraries. I don’t think anyone should be dependent on a third-party company for something as important as the media they care about.
So my recommendation is to convert your discs to build your own personal streaming setup, and to keep the discs. You don’t ever want to lose your originals. What happens if your digital copies get corrupted or the drive dies? What happens if there’s a fire that destroys your computer, or a virus that wipes it out, but the discs survive on a shelf in the next room? The discs are your master backup. Don’t throw them out.
A Quick Note on the Legal Side
I’m not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the United States allows U.S. citizens to make backup copies of movies and TV shows they’ve purchased, and to record off-air content, for personal use only. It doesn’t apply outside the U.S., and individual states or localities may have their own rules.
The DMCA also doesn’t clearly address what happens if you make a backup and then dispose of the original disc. It may technically be illegal to keep the digital copy once you’ve sold or discarded the disc — I genuinely don’t know. To cover yourself, consult a lawyer before you start any of this, and confirm what’s legal where you live. Everything in this series is provided for reference, on the assumption that you’ve already done that due diligence.
The Drive Matters More Than You’d Think
With the disclaimer out of the way, let’s talk about the actual ripping. There are a lot of software options and a lot of different disc drives. For DVDs, most drives will work, but some are a lot faster than others. You should be able to digitize a feature-length movie off DVD in about 20 to 25 minutes. A Blu-ray should take more like 40 minutes. A 4K disc will be longer.
If you start ripping and your first DVD takes two hours, or it errors out repeatedly, you may need to invest in a better drive. I’m not going to recommend a specific model — supply changes faster than I can keep up with — but I’d suggest consulting ChatGPT, Gemini, or any of the other AIs for current drive guidance. There are also plenty of forums where people share which drives are working well. Some drives can’t copy certain types of discs, so they work on some and then suddenly not on others. Pick a good one.
If your collection includes 4K discs, you need a UHD-capable drive, and those are very rare right now because a major Blu-ray drive manufacturer shut down operations recently. I was lucky to grab one of the best ones for about $150, along with two DVD drives to supplement it. Today, the same drive used would probably run me $400.
Step One: Ripping With MakeMKV
I’m going to recommend a two-step process. First, you copy the media off the disc using MakeMKV. It’s straightforward copying software, and they sell a lifetime license for $60. There may be free options that do the same job — I tried several before settling — but MakeMKV is the only one I’ll recommend. You can install the free trial and use it for a few days to make sure the project is for you before you spend the money.
Using it is simple: select your drive, click the button to load the disc information, and then choose the tracks you want. The track-picking part is the hardest. For DVDs, there’s usually no information on the disc at all except the size of each track. The largest one is the movie, obviously. If it’s a TV show, there might be multiple smaller tracks that you need. I find that most movies are in the 3 to 6 GB range on DVD and the 20 to 40 GB range on Blu-ray. Don’t panic at the size — we’re going to compress that later.
Once you pick the track and hit Start, MakeMKV records it onto your drive in MKV format. An MKV from this step is a raw disc rip, byte-for-byte lossless. It’s the original quality that’s on the disc. But unless you own a movie theater, you don’t need that level of quality on your drive long-term.
Step Two: Compressing With HandBrake
To shrink those files down, you need a second piece of software: HandBrake. It’s free, and it works really well as long as you have the right settings.
I literally have a 150-inch projector screen, and I do not see a difference between a raw MKV and a properly compressed file. A DVD should compress down to somewhere between 700 MB and 1.5 GB. A Blu-ray should land at a couple of gigabytes, five at the very most. A 4K disc will be larger, and I’ll cover those settings in more detail later.
HandBrake has a hundred different settings and hundreds of presets. I tried several presets and picked the one that looked best on my screen before moving forward. This part matters more than you’d think, because your plan is to convert each file, delete the original, and save the disc space. That means you have to figure out the settings you want now and commit to them.
You might save more disk space by going with 720p, and you might think, “I only have a 50-inch TV right now, why do I need this to look good on a 100-inch?” But what happens when you upgrade your TV in three years? You want the highest quality you think you might ever need, settled now.
The other side of that: there’s no point converting a DVD to 2160p. We’re not upscaling here — that’s a whole different conversation, and I haven’t even decided whether I’m going to start doing it for my movies yet, so I won’t be covering it in this series. For DVDs and Blu-rays, target 1080p. For 4K, target 2160p.
Once HandBrake runs, you’ll have two files: the original MKV and the new compressed MP4. Before you delete the MKV, I recommend testing a couple of them on your TV to make sure everything plays cleanly. I’ll cover Plex in a future article — you can skip ahead to that one if you don’t yet have a way to play these files on your TV. Once you’ve confirmed the MP4 looks good, you can delete the MKV.
What About File Names?
Naming is the next article in this series. The short version: save each file with the movie name, the year, and the IMDb ID — something like Inception (2010) [imdb-tt1375666].mp4. That naming pays off when you start letting scripts organize the collection, which is where Part 2 picks up.
Until then — make sure you have a lot of disk space, and stay tuned for the next one.
The full series — Building My Personal Streaming Library:
- Part 1: Why I Started Ripping Thousands of DVDs and Blu-rays (you are here)
- Part 2: File Naming and the Scripts That Organize It All
- Part 3: Wrangling a 115,000-Track Music Collection With Claude’s Help