There’s still interest in video DVDs – DVDs with new movies are still sold, while GOTD had a ripper on offer, & Digiarty is again giving away their software. winxdvd[.]com/backup-dvd/how-to-backup-dvd-collection.htm
Nowadays *Ripping* a DVD means transcoding the video into another format & optionally frame size. As a rule, don’t do it – use the original DVD video, or buy the streaming version or the Blu-ray. Reencoding video does let you make the files smaller, making it easier to store them, but the video on most DVDs just isn’t good enough to survive the process and still look good. I put the DVD or Blu-ray on a USB drive that fits not just my PC but the cell phones & tablets [e.g. the SanDisk SDDD3-064G-G46], and if necessary, use the VLC player. That works with even the cheapest Kindle HD tablets, so I no longer need to transcode anything just to get it to work.
Now if you have some older DVDs in your collection, made before Blu-ray discs were available, you *might* get away with reencoding and have video that’s watchable [not high quality] full screen on up to a 1080p display. Once they started selling Blu-ray discs, the studios didn’t have to worry about customer complaints of poor video quality on their DVDs – if you really cared about quality, you’d buy the Blu-ray version – so they artificially reduced DVD video quality to the barest minimum. That is an effective method of DRM specifically tailored to discourage ripping. You can’t reencode video without quality loss, and today the quality is normally so low that it cannot tolerate that loss and still be watchable. Yes, newer methods of video compression are more advanced & efficient, which is how you can have reduced file sizes after reencoding, but no compression format can increase quality – the best you can hope for is to retain *most* of the quality of the original.
You can often do a better job than most DVD rippers by performing individual steps on your own, first off reverting to the 24 fps progressive video used by a movie. Most movies started out as film, which is made up of full, complete frames at 24 fps. Both NTSC & PAL TV analog broadcast standards called for interlacing, where the odd numbered lines of the display were recorded in one, sort of half frame, and the even numbered lines were recorded on the next ½ frame – think of looking out the window with the blinds half closed. A TV camera would record things that way, but a film digitized at 24 fps full frame or progressive used special flags in the video file to tell the player which frames to show more than once. That also solved the problem where the film’s 24 fps was nowhere near the NTSC standard of 29.97 fps. Ignoring or removing those flags [sometimes called IVT or Inverse Telecine, or just removing 3-2 pulldown] doesn’t change quality, but it does mean you have fewer video frames to reencode, so you can use a higher bit rate for better quality with the same size video file.
Unfortunately, there’s not much to be done when it comes to enlarging those video frames. To start out with you’re already handicapped… most DVD movies have a 16:9 wide screen picture, BUT, they do not use 16:9 video. An NTSC DVD must stick to the analog broadcast standards, with a video frame that’s just over 640 pixels wide & 480 pixels tall. On a DVD with a 4:3 picture that’s stretched to 720 pixels wide – on a 16:9 picture it’s stretched further. [PAL works the same way, but the numbers are slightly different.] The best you can do is let the TV [or software player] enlarge the picture to 1080p. If you use subtitles, OCR those to a .srt file [e.g. use the SubTitle Edit app], using a player that uses them, or use that .srt file when you create a Blu-ray using the original mpg2 video from the DVD as-is [that’s in spec BTW].
That said, if for some reason you want to stick with some of the basics of the DVD video format, whether it’s just the size of the picture or a complete, working DVD, if you start from scratch using Blu-ray quality video, you can get much better results – higher quality than most any retail DVD – simply because you’re not trying to purposely limit the quality of the video.
Backing up your DVD collection is a better alternative, copying the contents of the disc to a hard drive [or other storage], optionally burning that content to new discs. Hard drives etc. are relatively cheap, but burning discs has advantages too. FWIW, the Windows 7 Media Center seemed almost specifically designed to manage & play DVD collections stored on hard drives. With win7 at EOL, I could see some folks using an old win7 license on an old &/or minimum spec PC just to run Media Center to organize & play their DVD collection stored on hard drives. It’d have no reason to connect to the internet, so networking could be disabled, and as a closed system, should be as safe tomorrow as it is today.
Storage requirements can be reduced if you save just the title [movie] video with one soundtrack & one subtitle track. That may get you as low as 3 GB per DVD, while the most any DVD could ever be was 8GB. The DVD format combines the video, audio, & subtitle tracks into .VOB files – the audio & video can be extracted and saved in an mpg2 file without reencoding. While that leaves the subs out, very many DVD mpg2 video files have CC embedded, which can be displayed by some players, and the subs can also be OCRed to .srt files that can be displayed in compatible players.
There aren’t many options when it comes to a video DVD’s menus &/or added features. You can keep them all, remove them all [just saving the movie], or create a new DVD using parts of the original. Just copying the DVD to a hard drive [using special software to handle the DRM] is of course the quickest & easiest. You’ll have a folder named whatever you want, with a mandatory VIDEO_TS folder holding the contents of the DVD, and *maybe* an AUDIO_TS folder that’s always empty, often not used at all, but part of the original spec nonetheless. For some reason some folks fixate on ISO files (?) – if that’s all your software will save, mount the ISO and copy those folders to your hard drive.
Some apps that let you copy DVDs will also let you save just the title [e.g. the movie] that you want, but if the software you use doesn’t, the old, free, DVD Shrink still works and will do that for you. It’s virtually identical to older versions of Nero Recode BTW. It’ll also let you trim the end credits, which can save a surprising amount of space. DVD Shrink’s main trick was to drop some of the in-between frames used by the mpg2 compression, reducing the size of the video file. It works OK if you keep it in the 90+% range, but don’t go below that or quality suffers noticeably.
Recreating a DVD is easier than many would think -- the hardest part is that you have to be careful selecting the DVD authoring software you use. Some apps will let you use audio & video without reencoding it, & they may or may not check to make sure it meets specs. Other apps will insist on reencoding everything, which You Do Not Want. Apps like the free PgcDemux will extract the original tracks or streams to separate files that you can import into your DVD authoring app. Videohelp[.]com has plenty of different tools you can use, but depending on which ones you choose, you may have to fiddle with your workflow a bit. I used to use Vegas Pro & DVD Architect, but DVD Architect would not accept the .m2v video files PgcDemux gives you – I had to run them through another tool to combine them with a nonexistent audio track to get a .mpg file that had more timing info. It was only an extra 1 or 2 minutes of work, and IMHO illustrates the sorts of usually minor gotchas you can encounter. The main benefit of recreating a DVD is that you can have a menu, so that you can include one or all of the DVD’s special features, leaving out the stuff you don’t want, whether that’s extra audio tracks in other languages or stuff like trailers for other movies. Some people went further, creating DVDs they felt appropriate for their kids… that could amount to leaving some features or cuts out, to editing the actual video &/or audio to strip out parts they didn’t want their kids to see or hear.
When you’re recreating a DVD, with or without menus, another trick that reduces the total file space requirement is to replace the often 5.1 audio track with a stereo track, but the conversion can be a bit involved. [The tools I’d have recommended back when I was working with DVDs won’t work in anything newer than XP.] One bit of software that remains the same however is the free ImgBurn, which is the most reliable way to burn single or dual layer DVDs & BDs [Blu-ray discs]. Burning dual layer discs is not hard at all using the app, & they work, making the reencoding of DVD video so that it will fit a single layer disc senseless.