I just for it on Blu-Ray myself yesterday ever though I had the DVD version and ripped in Digital format. I am now Ripping my Blu-Ray versions into a Digital format. I have real Discs that I own, no Digital rights Management on a Digital version. It takes time being in HD, but worth it.
On a PC, I use MakeMKV which will rip DVD's, HD DVD's and Blu-Ray's. It's free to use the Beta versions for almost forever, but it's only $50 for lifetime and well worth it. This gets you around 8 gig's in size per Episode. A season is 22 episodes and so that eats up a lot of space. This is where you use a program called Handbreak. You can process those 8 Gig files though this program and shrink them down to size which I'm seeing just a little over 1 Gig in size.
DVD's work great also. You can shrink a movie right now and in either case it still looks just as good. I put my copies on my NAS and watch using PLEX. One thing that can screw things up is DVD order and Aired Order. They can actually be different!!! PLEX will for example lable the shows for the order they they aired on TV, and not the order they are on the Discs!!! You can look this up on places like http://thetvdb.com/ search for Farscape and click on season 1 and you can click between the 2 listings. When ripping them, the Movies are not in the same logical order as listed on the discs. I believe they are backwards. 5 Episodes on disc, when you rip, the first may be the last and the last the first and that's DVD Order, and then you have to change from DVD Order to Aired Date Ordered. What's really hard, I don't see Episode Name when the program starts like most. Kind of strange. You can do things like going to HULU and playing the Clip for each Episode and matching that way. Kind of a pain. Not sure if there's a easier way. If you don't use something like PLEX and just name your Episodes in DVD Order, you still have to go backwards on each disc I believe. If you don't pay attention, they will get all out of order and you don't know what's up and I think that's part of the reason why then do things like this on the discs.
Still $20 per season for a Digital Format that you're locked into itunes? or whatever other service you buy a Digital copy from. That's $80 with no extra's. Or you spend $40-$50 and get it on Blu-Ray and do the work yourself and have NO Digital Rights Management on them!!! You paid for the movies!!!
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zootie
9 years ago
Yes, I also prefer to have the actual files on a disk array somewhere (and have the optical disks stored safely away).
Companies come and go, and deals/contracts expired (ie, shows gets removed from a streaming platform). If you like a show like this one, you should have the media for offline viewing, and probably put in the CPU cycles to make your own digital copy.
It is easy (and legal) to rip the optical disks for personal backup (and stream viewing convenience on your LAN), it just takes CPU time. I've been using Handbrake (https://handbrake.fr - also, available free, with expiring versions, so it someday might go premium). I only use sporadically MakeMKV with some non-standard DVDs that trip up Handbrake.
I like that (like MakeMKV) it can easily include all the audio and subtitle tracks, but IMO it is easier for transcoding. For a multi-lingual household, it makes it easy to keep a single version of the movies (and each viewer having audio/subtitles they prefer).
I try and include the chapter names from Chapter DB http://chapterdb.org. In fact, I corrected/loaded the chapter names for Casablanca (most of the versions on Chapter DB have the wrong names, depending on the DVD/BR disc regions). I use http://www.snyderfamily.com/cdb2hb.php to try and convert the chapter names to a CSV that handbrake can handle, but it often fails (handbrake has issues with double quotes and other escape chars often found in chapter tile names).
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