Hello all,

Recently I've wanted to start trying to rip my DVD/BluRay movie collection in order to be able to stream them from a home Plex server. I've had pretty limited success doing this in Linux so far...

I've tried 'Handbrake' and it won't even find the title of the DVD disc that's in a drive. Was going to try 'MakeMKV' but it seems quite convoluted to get installed and the program hasn't been updated in like 15 years.

Wondering if anyone has had good results doing this in Linux, and if so, what software did you use? Anything obvious that I'm missing here? Thanks for any help you can provide.

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Re: Ripping DVD/BD in Linux
By: Gamgee to All on Sun Sep 07 2025 06:47 pm

Recently I've wanted to start trying to rip my DVD/BluRay movie collection in order to be able to stream them from a home Plex server. I've had pretty limited success doing this in Linux so far...

I've tried 'Handbrake' and it won't even find the title of the DVD disc that's in a drive. Was going to try 'MakeMKV' but it seems quite convoluted to get installed and the program hasn't been updated in like 15 years.

I'd try with MakeMKV. I use that in Windows, and it works fairly well. It has a Linux version too; I haven't tried the Linux verison, but I imagine it should work as well as the Windows version. It looks like there isn't a download link for the Linux version on their main site - it says there's a thread on their forum site where you can download the Linux version:

https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=224

I only use Handbrake for transcoding; I've never actually ripped with Handbrake.

Nightfox

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Nightfox wrote to Gamgee <=-

Re: Ripping DVD/BD in Linux
By: Gamgee to All on Sun Sep 07 2025 06:47 pm

Recently I've wanted to start trying to rip my DVD/BluRay movie collection in order to be able to stream them from a home Plex server. I've had pretty limited success doing this in Linux so far...

I've tried 'Handbrake' and it won't even find the title of the DVD disc that's in a drive. Was going to try 'MakeMKV' but it seems quite convoluted to get installed and the program hasn't been updated in like 15 years.

I'd try with MakeMKV. I use that in Windows, and it works fairly well.
It has a Linux version too; I haven't tried the Linux verison, but I imagine it should work as well as the Windows version. It looks like there isn't a download link for the Linux version on their main site -
it says there's a thread on their forum site where you can download the Linux version:

https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=224

Yep, I will try to get that running. Thanks.

I only use Handbrake for transcoding; I've never actually ripped with Handbrake.

Still learning some of the terminology... So you are using Handbrake to
do something like converting to/from different formats such as .mp4 and
.mkv ? This would be on an already-ripped movie file?



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Still learning some of the terminology... So you are using Handbrake to
do something like converting to/from different formats such as .mp4 and
.mkv ? This would be on an already-ripped movie file?

Yes, sorr of. Even between the same formats, using Handbrake to re-encode it can result in a much smaller file. MakeMKV makes an exact 1:1 rip, which is good, but the files are large. I buy 4K movies sometimes, and a 4K movie could be about 70GB in size, and by re-encoding, I've often gotten them down to about 3GB ib some cases, though sometimes they come out larger. I still keep a backup of the original rip.

Also, mkv isn't really a format in itself. mkv is a container format, which means it can contain video of any format, as well as audio tracks of any format and subtitles too, all inside the mkv. Common video codecs supporter by a lot of modern devices these days are h264 (older) and h265. AV1 is even newer and is supposed to provide better quality and smaller files, I believe, but isn't widely supported yet. Common audio codecs that a lot of movies use are AAC, AC3, and DTS.

Nightfox

---
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Nightfox wrote to Gamgee <=-

Still learning some of the terminology... So you are using Handbrake to
do something like converting to/from different formats such as .mp4 and
.mkv ? This would be on an already-ripped movie file?

Yes, sorr of. Even between the same formats, using Handbrake to
re-encode it can result in a much smaller file. MakeMKV makes an exact
1:1 rip, which is good, but the files are large. I buy 4K movies sometimes, and a 4K movie could be about 70GB in size, and by
re-encoding, I've often gotten them down to about 3GB ib some cases, though sometimes they come out larger. I still keep a backup of the original rip.

Also, mkv isn't really a format in itself. mkv is a container format, which means it can contain video of any format, as well as audio tracks
of any format and subtitles too, all inside the mkv. Common video
codecs supporter by a lot of modern devices these days are h264 (older) and h265. AV1 is even newer and is supposed to provide better quality
and smaller files, I believe, but isn't widely supported yet. Common
audio codecs that a lot of movies use are AAC, AC3, and DTS.

Excellent info, thank you!



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