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Mircea

Noooooooo!

Real programmers use butterflies

To clear up some shelf space, and ease retrieval, I am copying all my DVD/BD discs to hard disc. For now, I keep them in the same file structure as on the original (i.e. VIDEO_TS / BDMV directories), so I can select audio /subtitle track, titles and chapters at play time. The player must recognize the directory structure. PC players of today do, but you never know about the future. I do not know about smartphones and other non-PC devices that people use for watching movies.

I sure can extract each title to a e.g. a plain H.264/H.265 video file. Then I must select a single audio track and either hard-sub one subtitle track (burn it into the image) or OCR subtitles to .srt files. (DVD/BD subtitles are not character codes, but text images!) All subtitle extracting programs I tried make so many errors that proofreading / correcting easily takes more effort than playing the movie and typing the subtitles as they pass by, even if I have to pause the movie many times. (Text rippers do give me the .srt time stamps, though.) I consider that an emergency / non-viable solution.

Are there alternate video container formats that handle multiple audio/subtitle tracks, and preferably title/chapter structures? Are there tools available for converting DVD/BD structures into this format without loosing any such information?

I obviously look for a format likely to live significantly longer than DVD/BD formats, available on a wider range of playback devices, today and in the future.

From .mkv lie sheets, it might look as if MKV is designed for (some of) these requirements, but I never found a DVD/BD-to-MKV converter (or disk-to-MKV ripper) pretending to support it. Or it was so deeply hidden in the options that I overlooked it. Or my MKV player software doesn't support it. If MKV is The Answer, tell me what software to use (both for converting/ripping and playing)! Smile | :)

[Bonus question to those using their smart phone to watch movies: Can smartphone video apps play back DVD/BD directories? All of them? Some? None?]

[Bonus question 2: When DVDs were introduced, the option to provide multiple camera angles, aka parallel video tracks, was heavily boosted in marketing. None of my several hundred movies make use of this facility, and it would obviously be incompatible with broadcasting or movie theater screening. Has any of you ever seen a commercial DVD/BD movie (excluding demos for showing the mechanism) allowing you to select camera angle?]

Not sure what your other requirements might be, or whether you care about recompressing to save disk space, but what about simply ripping directly to ISO? That way your files are identical to the original, and you can re-burn to an identical copy should you ever decide you want something back on disc.

To play back, mount the ISO, and you have a virtual drive that any player that works with a "real" disc should work with.

M.D.V.

If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.

Saving disk space is a non-issue. (I just bought another 14 TB disk.)

My requirements are essentially for a file format that we can expect to be viable at least ten years from now, hopefully twenty. And, one that at that time we can expect to be handled by the majority of players.

You suggest an ISO image of the DVD/BD disk. That is one containing the directory structure of a DVD/BD disk. My worry is that in ten to twenty years, the typical media player software will not be able to mount an ISO image of a DVD/BD, and will not be capable of interpreting the VIDEO_TS/BDMV directories - and to be able to bypass the encryption, region restrictions etc. When I rather rip those directories to my HD, I can copy the files to another file system, and make myself independent of any ISO reading capability and of any need for encryption or region bypassing software.

For the long term accessibility requirements, I see ISO files as a no better solution than plain (but decoded) VIDEO_TS/BDMV directory copies.

I suspect ISOs will be around for a long time, and operating systems will continue be able to mount them for years to come.

As for players being able to use them...hang on to the players that work right now, and (at worse) hope they keep working on the operating systems of tomorrow. Review every 5 years or so, and if you're finding support is disappearing, look for converting/migrating then. Don't worry about having an archive format today that will continue to work 20 years from now.

dandy72 wrote:
Don't worry about having an archive format today that will continue to work 20 years from now.

Well... A whole lot of private archives, not the least photo archives from the first couple of generations of digital cameras, will be lost: The files are kept in the attic (/basement), but who can read the files of those old 5.25" diskettes today? Even with 3.5" diskettes you may have trouble finding one today. And even if you find one (I've got a USB diskette station that may be plugged in "everywhere"): The majority of preformatted diskettes of the 1990s didn't have a proper format code written into the boot sector. Win 9x (and predecessors all the way back to early DOS) would then try alternate formats, one by one, until one succeeded. Win 2K/XP and successors said: No format code? Then it isn't formatted, and can't be read.

Even if the medium is properly formatted, you may still have a problem. "Everyone said that magnetic tape was the solution for my long-time storage, so I've got these Travan tapes ...". Can you still buy drives reading the early generations of Travan drives? Those I was in touch with had dedicated interface cards for the ISA bus. When did you last see a PC with an ISA bus?

Unless you prepare for your current formats going obsolete in five to ten years, you will loose some of your data. I've got documents, photos and other data that I can no longer read: For the 2" diskettes of my first digital camera (it wasn't mine but my employer's, so I couldn't keep it) I have no reader. The documents I wrote in Ami Pro I have preserved as files, but the software to read them disappeared when I switched jobs, 20+ years ago.

And so on. If you refuse to see 20 years ahead, I assume that you don't care to see 20 years backwards in time. What happened in the last millennium has no interest. If you think so, fair enough. You have the right to. But for those thinking of history, background, earlier knowledge ... as having some sort of value, information storage over a period far beyond 20+ years are essential. Not a luxury reqirement.

Don't confuse file format with storage media.

It's been years I've had anything I care about that's still only stored on floppies. That's all been moved to hard drives by now. If hard drives eventually go away, by then I'll already have migrated these files onto SSD or thumbdrives. While my backup set size increases over time, it's no longer at risk of being "forgotten in the attic".

A physical format is a format as well. If you cannot access the physical format, it is useless even if you could have interpreted the data format - if you could have accessed it.

It is really insignificant on which level you cannot access the information, if it is due to the physical dimensions of the medium, the physical encoding of the bits, the way the bits are organized - from sector and tracks on the physical medium, through directory and file formats, to data formats within a file. If the information is inaccessible due to an unhandled format, it is inaccessible, regardless of level.

You may claim to always be ahead, always switching to new media, to new file systems, to new data formats, years ahead of their obsoletion. Lots of people are not following you; they do trust that those backups in the the attic will be as durable as grandmas old photo album.

Another problem is that you might be betting on the wrong horse. Like, I have helped out a couple people who had PC breakdowns, bought a new one, and several months later, when it was time for another round of complete backup, "discovered" that their new PC didn't have a CD burner. So it couldn't create a new backup - and couldn't read back the pile of old backup CDs.

I must admit that I went into that trap myself, although not backup related: A special request made me dig up an old, external adapter, to be plugged into the COM port of the computer. That's a piece of cake, not? But I couldn't find the COM port! The PC was more than two years old, and for over two years, I had never had a need for a COM port, and never realized that it was missing! Later I discovered that the motherboard had a COM header, and in my junk box I found a bracket with a COM socket, so I could have used my current computer. Before I discovered that, I had dug up an old PC wreck from the basement, one with an easy-to-find COM socket.

In an ideal world, no data is lost because physical, filesystem or information formats become obsolete. In an ideal world, no data is lost in conversion from one format to another one. But as they say: In theory, there is no difference theory and practice, but in practice there is.

trønderen wrote:
A physical format is a format as well. If you cannot access the physical format, it is useless even if you could have interpreted the data format - if you could have accessed it.

It is really insignificant on which level you cannot access the information, if it is due to the physical dimensions of the medium, the physical encoding of the bits, the way the bits are organized - from sector and tracks on the physical medium, through directory and file formats, to data formats within a file. If the information is inaccessible due to an unhandled format, it is inaccessible, regardless of level.

You have plenty of time to switch physical formats; I've already made the case for that. To reuse your example, at this point in time you have no excuse to only have data on a floppy disk if you care about that data.

As for file formats - virtualization can help. If you have a file that can only be read by software that no longer runs on modern OSes (say, it only runs on XP), then you can run XP in a VM, install the software on it, and hang on to that VM. If a hypervisor manufacturer is showing signs that he's going to abandon support for older OSes, then look for something else to run that VM. VMware can still run Windows 95. Hyper-V can't, but it'll run DOS, which is older still.

trønderen wrote:
You may claim to always be ahead, always switching to new media, to new file systems, to new data formats, years ahead of their obsoletion. Lots of people are not following you; they do trust that those backups in the the attic will be as durable as grandmas old photo album.

And whose problem is that? I'm just telling you how I'd avoid the problems you're worrying about. It's up to these people to heed the advice they're given. They can't blame anyone but themselves if they don't.

trønderen wrote:
Another problem is that you might be betting on the wrong horse. Like, I have helped out a couple people who had PC breakdowns, bought a new one, and several months later, when it was time for another round of complete backup, "discovered" that their new PC didn't have a CD burner. So it couldn't create a new backup - and couldn't read back the pile of old backup CDs.

What a contrived example. Even with a laptop with no internal drive, you still have the option today to get a USB CD/DVD drive to read those backups. If you care about the data on those CDs, spend the money for an external drive and transfer it to another media. If you're waiting until CD drives completely disappear from the surface of the Earth before finding out you still need one...whose fault is that?

trønderen wrote:
In an ideal world, no data is lost because physical, filesystem or information formats become obsolete. In an ideal world, no data is lost in conversion from one format to another one. But as they say: In theory, there is no difference theory and practice, but in practice there is.

I'm not disagreeing here. But you have to take responsibility for your own archives if you care about them.

The oldest data I have is maybe 25 years old, and it's in no danger of being made unreadable. Video encoded with old codecs can still be converted. Pictures...well, I'm still not seeing support for GIFs going away. Audio formats from 25 years ago is the same. RealPlayer? If I had such files I wanted to keep, they would have been converted about 15 years ago.

If I had an old database that went back to (say) dBase, then there are tools that can still read those back, to this day, and extract tables and their relationships. Any proprietary front-end to this database would've been abandoned a long time ago and migrated elsewhere.

Have a look at rebox.net Smile | :)

OK, that may be a good ripper (I haven't tried that one yet, I will!) - but essentially my problem is not the ripping, but which format to rip to. Two major concerns: Will the format preserve multiple audio tracks and multiple subtitle tracks so that they can be selected at play time? And: Is this a format that we have reasons to believe that will be handled by the majority of playback devices ten and twenty years from now?

I'll take a look at rebox.net, but by itself it doesn't answer the question about a suitable file format.

MKV seems to be the format you want. Whether it's around in 20 years... you'll have to wait and see Smile | :)

Which MKC rippers/converters will convert multiple audio / subtitle streams and title / chapter structures from a DVD/BD?

Which MKV players are available to let me, at play time, select from the alternative audio / subtitle tracks and to let me navigate in the title / chapter structure of the original DVD/BD?

You could recompress your files to MP4. That would save some space, at the cost of some resolution, and would still allow selection of multiple audio tracks etc. You would lose the fancy menus that some DVD/BD titles come with.

[Bonus Q2]: I have a few videos (some Disney and some action films, IIRC) that provide multiple camera angles, but I've never actually used them.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.

Saving space is a non-concern. Disk is cheap nowadays.

MP4 is certainly capable of handling any resolution. Maybe your concern is about conversion losses, but with a good converter, those are minimal - and lots of BD video is already in an MP4 format that should not require any conversion at all.

I have made MP4 versions of a number of my movie, mostly to take them to friends with "smart-TVs" that were not smart enough to play BD images (BDMV directory structures). With the software I have used, I have not been able to embed into the MP4 file several audio or subtitle streams, or title/chapter structure information. If you know of software that can do this: What is the software you are using?

I use a program called DVDFab (www dot dvdfab dot cn). It's not free, but does a decent job of copying and ripping DVDs. I have just verified that it creates MP4 files with multiple audio streams, multiple subtitles, and chapter marks.

Note that all of the above must be in the original stream. AFAICS, it provides no methods for incorporating additional streams into the output MP4, nor can it create additional chapter marks.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.

trønderen wrote:
[Bonus question 2: When DVDs were introduced, the option to provide multiple camera angles, aka parallel video tracks, was heavily boosted in marketing.

I've heard, but believe me or not, I have never seen for myself, that this feature was mostly used in the pr0n business when it was invented. Just because they could, I'd imagine. Blush | :O

Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
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The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine
Winston Churchill, 1944
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Never argue with a fool. Onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.
Mark Twain

modified 11-Dec-20 6:52am.

So maybe I should get hold of some pr0n movies ... Smile | :)

I'm almost done doing the same thing, actually.

The last weeks, I've ripped all of my DVD's to ISO files and thrown away most of the physical discs (saved a few of my favourites, though).

I must have ripped around 1500 discs, and the problem with that is of course that it takes a LOT of harddisk space. I've bought myself two 10Tb discs, one for movies, and one for TV series.

I have yet to decide what to do about the Bluray discs. I haven't got quite as many of those, but if ripped, they would obviously take up a whole lot more space per disc than the DVDs.

A curiosity: I activated disc compression on the two drives, because I wanted to save as much disk space as possibly. But lo and behold: The amount of space used before and after compression was pretty much the same. Seems like the DVD format is already compressed almost to the max.

Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
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The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine
Winston Churchill, 1944
-
Never argue with a fool. Onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.
Mark Twain

modified 11-Dec-20 6:55am.

Johnny J. wrote:
A curiosity: I activated disc compression on the two drives, because I wanted to save as much disk space as possibly. But lo and behold: The amount of space used before and after compression was pretty much the same. Seems like the DVD format is already compressed almost to the max.

I hope you're not surprised by this. Video compression is the holy grail of video storage and distribution, so if you could simply compress video by running it through WinZip and gain significant savings...that would mean codec developers have seriously dropped the ball.

I feel your pain re: ripping Blu-ray discs. I don't have many - and of those, there's maybe 12-15, max, that I want to keep backed up to a drive. They're all dual-layer, so you're talking about a minimum of 25 GB each. Many are closer to the disc's 50GB capacity.

And then, I just bought the full Game of Thrones series in 4K. I don't even know how much space a single disc might take - I don't imagine the "old" Blu-ray drive hooked up to my system could read them even if I tried.

dandy72 wrote:
I hope you're not surprised by this.

Not as such, but it may or may not have surprised me that somebody had actually had luck in developing something that both worked and was efficient at the same time... Laugh | :laugh:

I may have worked with computers for too long... Sigh | :sigh:

Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
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The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine
Winston Churchill, 1944
-
Never argue with a fool. Onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.
Mark Twain

Johnny J. wrote:
both worked and was efficient at the same time...

I guess that's an iterative process. MPEG-2, in hindsight, is probably considered to be horribly inefficient if you compare with H.265 files. Much smaller files, yet many times the resolution. But try to zip either, and you won't gain anything in any appreciable amount.

To echo what dandy72 says: Modern video compression is extremely well tailored to that specific use, and there is no way that a general method (such as zip) for 'any' data format could do a better job. If you manage to dig up an extreme example where zip reduced the file size by half a percent, the savings would be in the metadata of the file, not in the video content.

I've got 'enough' disk space to rip even BD disks. But I encountered a problem when I wanted to take a BD movie to a friend to play on his smart-TV: It didn't fit on my old 32 GB memory sticks, so I had to buy a new 64 MB memory stick. ... And later, I brought that memory stick to another friend, but his smart-TV was so old that it only supported USB sticks up to 32GB size!

Bonus comment, now that we are in season: That BD movie not fitting on as 32GB stick was the Finish "Rare Exports" Christmas horror comedy. We view that on every winter solstice. It is just a great movie! Be prepared for getting a different view on St. Claus after watching it Smile | :)

(Rare Exports - IMDb[^]

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