I Need to Copy Hundreds of DVDs to a Portable HDD
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Years ago I took a very pricey gunsmithing course which delivered content via DVDs. The first round was about 90 DVDs, plus a number of individual armorer's courses over the years. That brought Level II Professional as a certification point, and covered in detail about 400 to 500 types of gun. I didn't bother to advance to the Master-level courses, since a lot of the cost was all the tools they included; I already owned those tools - lathe, mill, grinders, band saw, welding equipment, etc. I recently found they have yet another level - Advanced Master - which builds on the previous work I'd done and adds a few hundred more DVDs, but no longer includes the tools. Manually copying this much material to a HDD wil take years, and I know DVDs don't last forever. Is there a machine I can buy to speed up copying a bunch of Gunsmithing DVDs to a single HDD to avoid the risk of losing the information. I know many of you have been copying music to HDDs; what do you to make this simpler?
Will Rogers never met me.
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Years ago I took a very pricey gunsmithing course which delivered content via DVDs. The first round was about 90 DVDs, plus a number of individual armorer's courses over the years. That brought Level II Professional as a certification point, and covered in detail about 400 to 500 types of gun. I didn't bother to advance to the Master-level courses, since a lot of the cost was all the tools they included; I already owned those tools - lathe, mill, grinders, band saw, welding equipment, etc. I recently found they have yet another level - Advanced Master - which builds on the previous work I'd done and adds a few hundred more DVDs, but no longer includes the tools. Manually copying this much material to a HDD wil take years, and I know DVDs don't last forever. Is there a machine I can buy to speed up copying a bunch of Gunsmithing DVDs to a single HDD to avoid the risk of losing the information. I know many of you have been copying music to HDDs; what do you to make this simpler?
Will Rogers never met me.
Roger - sounds you are more into guns than DVDs. I'd recommend staying out of DYI and look for a professional company that does it for a living. Your request is certainly a niche'. Example: I had a bunch of compact VHS, 8mm, and VHS family tapes. Shipped them off and the company affordably (and no stress on my part) created mp3s.
Charlie Gilley “Microsoft is the virus..." "the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"
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Years ago I took a very pricey gunsmithing course which delivered content via DVDs. The first round was about 90 DVDs, plus a number of individual armorer's courses over the years. That brought Level II Professional as a certification point, and covered in detail about 400 to 500 types of gun. I didn't bother to advance to the Master-level courses, since a lot of the cost was all the tools they included; I already owned those tools - lathe, mill, grinders, band saw, welding equipment, etc. I recently found they have yet another level - Advanced Master - which builds on the previous work I'd done and adds a few hundred more DVDs, but no longer includes the tools. Manually copying this much material to a HDD wil take years, and I know DVDs don't last forever. Is there a machine I can buy to speed up copying a bunch of Gunsmithing DVDs to a single HDD to avoid the risk of losing the information. I know many of you have been copying music to HDDs; what do you to make this simpler?
Will Rogers never met me.
My friend melted his motherboard doing what you're looking to do, running massive transfers overnight. The mean time between failure for an HDD is 5 years, and you're about to put a year of wear on it in a matter of days. Get an SSD. Its MTBF is closer to 20 years You're probably better off just copying the discs, to be honest.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Years ago I took a very pricey gunsmithing course which delivered content via DVDs. The first round was about 90 DVDs, plus a number of individual armorer's courses over the years. That brought Level II Professional as a certification point, and covered in detail about 400 to 500 types of gun. I didn't bother to advance to the Master-level courses, since a lot of the cost was all the tools they included; I already owned those tools - lathe, mill, grinders, band saw, welding equipment, etc. I recently found they have yet another level - Advanced Master - which builds on the previous work I'd done and adds a few hundred more DVDs, but no longer includes the tools. Manually copying this much material to a HDD wil take years, and I know DVDs don't last forever. Is there a machine I can buy to speed up copying a bunch of Gunsmithing DVDs to a single HDD to avoid the risk of losing the information. I know many of you have been copying music to HDDs; what do you to make this simpler?
Will Rogers never met me.
Roger Wright wrote:
Manually copying this much material to a HDD wil take years
Let me put a word in favor of manual copying. My collection has about 400 DVD's and the "pipeline" is very simple: create an ISO image; use Handbrake to convert it to MP4. It takes only about 15-20 min to create an ISO image and I do other things while DVD's are being copied. When copying is complete the program makes a ring-a-ding and I just plop another DVD in there. Conversion to MP4 takes much longer but Handbrake allows you queue many jobs that I let running overnight. I never kept track of how much time I actually spent converting those DVD's, but now if I do a short calculation, turns out to be about 2 full weeks. I keep both ISO images and the MP4 in case I decide to fiddle around with Handbrake parameters (it has so freaking many parameters!) to get a better image.
Mircea
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Roger - sounds you are more into guns than DVDs. I'd recommend staying out of DYI and look for a professional company that does it for a living. Your request is certainly a niche'. Example: I had a bunch of compact VHS, 8mm, and VHS family tapes. Shipped them off and the company affordably (and no stress on my part) created mp3s.
Charlie Gilley “Microsoft is the virus..." "the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"
charlieg wrote:
sounds you are more into guns than DVDs.
It's a hobby, but one I can fall back on for income in bad times. I hadn't thought about using a copy service, since this is copyrighted material and I expect many companies might balk at that. But I do have a legal right to make a backup, I believe - at least, it used to be true. But I like our resident codewitch's idea of using SSD for longevity. I'll look into that.
Will Rogers never met me.
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My friend melted his motherboard doing what you're looking to do, running massive transfers overnight. The mean time between failure for an HDD is 5 years, and you're about to put a year of wear on it in a matter of days. Get an SSD. Its MTBF is closer to 20 years You're probably better off just copying the discs, to be honest.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
Thanks for the idea! I hadn't considered that option, but it makes perfect sense. I may work out a plan to copy each disk, after I watch it, to a spare HDD, creating an index of some sort, and a structured file folder system to make it easier to find specific topics. Once the content is copied, I'll know how big a SSD I need, and I can buy it and do a bulk copy. That way I'll still have it all long enough that I can give it to someone in my Will!
Will Rogers never met me.
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Roger Wright wrote:
Manually copying this much material to a HDD wil take years
Let me put a word in favor of manual copying. My collection has about 400 DVD's and the "pipeline" is very simple: create an ISO image; use Handbrake to convert it to MP4. It takes only about 15-20 min to create an ISO image and I do other things while DVD's are being copied. When copying is complete the program makes a ring-a-ding and I just plop another DVD in there. Conversion to MP4 takes much longer but Handbrake allows you queue many jobs that I let running overnight. I never kept track of how much time I actually spent converting those DVD's, but now if I do a short calculation, turns out to be about 2 full weeks. I keep both ISO images and the MP4 in case I decide to fiddle around with Handbrake parameters (it has so freaking many parameters!) to get a better image.
Mircea
Thanks for the tip, Mircea!
Will Rogers never met me.
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Thanks for the idea! I hadn't considered that option, but it makes perfect sense. I may work out a plan to copy each disk, after I watch it, to a spare HDD, creating an index of some sort, and a structured file folder system to make it easier to find specific topics. Once the content is copied, I'll know how big a SSD I need, and I can buy it and do a bulk copy. That way I'll still have it all long enough that I can give it to someone in my Will!
Will Rogers never met me.
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Years ago I took a very pricey gunsmithing course which delivered content via DVDs. The first round was about 90 DVDs, plus a number of individual armorer's courses over the years. That brought Level II Professional as a certification point, and covered in detail about 400 to 500 types of gun. I didn't bother to advance to the Master-level courses, since a lot of the cost was all the tools they included; I already owned those tools - lathe, mill, grinders, band saw, welding equipment, etc. I recently found they have yet another level - Advanced Master - which builds on the previous work I'd done and adds a few hundred more DVDs, but no longer includes the tools. Manually copying this much material to a HDD wil take years, and I know DVDs don't last forever. Is there a machine I can buy to speed up copying a bunch of Gunsmithing DVDs to a single HDD to avoid the risk of losing the information. I know many of you have been copying music to HDDs; what do you to make this simpler?
Will Rogers never met me.
Long time ago, I had problems with my HDD and a friend of mine burnt a CD in Linux that took 1,5 minutes to be done. In Windows back at that time it had at least needed 15 minutes and that without checking for errors. You could have a try with a plain dumb linux installation and some kind of ripper to *.iso? (you can later use Daemon Tools or something like that to use the *.iso in a virtual DVD)
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.
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If you use a ssd keep it in mind it has a limited amount of write cycles, which is probably fine for using it as a backup. But I've read that it needs to be powered on every now and then to refresh the nand memory.
Jacquers wrote:
But I've read that it needs to be powered on every now and then to refresh the nand memory.
I read that there are new types that get rid of that, but they still were expensive. Last 2 years I didn't check, maybe they got cheaper?
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.
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Years ago I took a very pricey gunsmithing course which delivered content via DVDs. The first round was about 90 DVDs, plus a number of individual armorer's courses over the years. That brought Level II Professional as a certification point, and covered in detail about 400 to 500 types of gun. I didn't bother to advance to the Master-level courses, since a lot of the cost was all the tools they included; I already owned those tools - lathe, mill, grinders, band saw, welding equipment, etc. I recently found they have yet another level - Advanced Master - which builds on the previous work I'd done and adds a few hundred more DVDs, but no longer includes the tools. Manually copying this much material to a HDD wil take years, and I know DVDs don't last forever. Is there a machine I can buy to speed up copying a bunch of Gunsmithing DVDs to a single HDD to avoid the risk of losing the information. I know many of you have been copying music to HDDs; what do you to make this simpler?
Will Rogers never met me.
Ripping to ISOs is obviously going to be the fastest, but in terms of total storage requirements, I'd be looking at then converting to MP4 or some other format, as others have suggested. Personally, I'm paranoid and wouldn't feel comfortable getting rid of either the original discs or the ISO files until I've watched at least a few. I've seen problems in the past where, after encoding, the audio would slowly drift from the video over time, so after (say) 90 minutes, people's mouths would be moving out of sync with the voices you heard. I don't know of any way to verify this without sitting through the entire thing. Also I wouldn't simply copy to DVD-Rs (unless I misunderstood some people's suggestions). The idea is to move away from the hundreds of discs and onto something more convenient. A big pile of files sitting on a single hard disk is a lot easier to deal with than a big pile of discs. Even uncompressed, you can put nearly 1000 dual-layer (8.5GB) DVDs on an 8TB hard drive, which are pretty cheap nowadays. Keep at least two copies of everything (one on a hard drive, another on SSDs?)...don't assume one's more reliable than the other. Then as larger capacity drives come out over the years, copy (don't *move*) the files onto the larger ones. Don't get rid of the other (older) drives unless you can make a few bucks from them, I suppose. Depends on how valuable this all is to you. And if you're going to re-encode video, I suggest you look at the H.265 codec. It's intended for high resolution video, but still works very well for DVD - the resulting files are *much* smaller, and as long as the bitrate remains high enough, you won't be able to tell, visually, the difference with the originals. I would also imagine this sort of material is recorded (at best) with 2-channel stereo, and not wasting bits on 6-channels. H.265 takes longer to encode, and you need a somewhat faster processor to play it back in real time than older formats, but unless you're dealing with something like a 10-year old CPU, that should generally not be a problem nowadays. I'm late to this thread, but I hope there was something valuable in there.
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Ripping to ISOs is obviously going to be the fastest, but in terms of total storage requirements, I'd be looking at then converting to MP4 or some other format, as others have suggested. Personally, I'm paranoid and wouldn't feel comfortable getting rid of either the original discs or the ISO files until I've watched at least a few. I've seen problems in the past where, after encoding, the audio would slowly drift from the video over time, so after (say) 90 minutes, people's mouths would be moving out of sync with the voices you heard. I don't know of any way to verify this without sitting through the entire thing. Also I wouldn't simply copy to DVD-Rs (unless I misunderstood some people's suggestions). The idea is to move away from the hundreds of discs and onto something more convenient. A big pile of files sitting on a single hard disk is a lot easier to deal with than a big pile of discs. Even uncompressed, you can put nearly 1000 dual-layer (8.5GB) DVDs on an 8TB hard drive, which are pretty cheap nowadays. Keep at least two copies of everything (one on a hard drive, another on SSDs?)...don't assume one's more reliable than the other. Then as larger capacity drives come out over the years, copy (don't *move*) the files onto the larger ones. Don't get rid of the other (older) drives unless you can make a few bucks from them, I suppose. Depends on how valuable this all is to you. And if you're going to re-encode video, I suggest you look at the H.265 codec. It's intended for high resolution video, but still works very well for DVD - the resulting files are *much* smaller, and as long as the bitrate remains high enough, you won't be able to tell, visually, the difference with the originals. I would also imagine this sort of material is recorded (at best) with 2-channel stereo, and not wasting bits on 6-channels. H.265 takes longer to encode, and you need a somewhat faster processor to play it back in real time than older formats, but unless you're dealing with something like a 10-year old CPU, that should generally not be a problem nowadays. I'm late to this thread, but I hope there was something valuable in there.
Very helpful information! And yes, this material is mostly recorded lectures and demonstrations of how to analyze firearm failures, fabricate new parts, and fit them to make repairs. There's no fast parts, no high quality audio, just straight training. The originals I got 8 years ago were actually VHS recordings transferred to DVDs, so quality is really not a huge issue. Preserving the information is all that I care about, and having all of it in one physical place would be helpful simply to save space! With the new additions, I probably have 15' to 20' of shelf space needed.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Ripping to ISOs is obviously going to be the fastest, but in terms of total storage requirements, I'd be looking at then converting to MP4 or some other format, as others have suggested. Personally, I'm paranoid and wouldn't feel comfortable getting rid of either the original discs or the ISO files until I've watched at least a few. I've seen problems in the past where, after encoding, the audio would slowly drift from the video over time, so after (say) 90 minutes, people's mouths would be moving out of sync with the voices you heard. I don't know of any way to verify this without sitting through the entire thing. Also I wouldn't simply copy to DVD-Rs (unless I misunderstood some people's suggestions). The idea is to move away from the hundreds of discs and onto something more convenient. A big pile of files sitting on a single hard disk is a lot easier to deal with than a big pile of discs. Even uncompressed, you can put nearly 1000 dual-layer (8.5GB) DVDs on an 8TB hard drive, which are pretty cheap nowadays. Keep at least two copies of everything (one on a hard drive, another on SSDs?)...don't assume one's more reliable than the other. Then as larger capacity drives come out over the years, copy (don't *move*) the files onto the larger ones. Don't get rid of the other (older) drives unless you can make a few bucks from them, I suppose. Depends on how valuable this all is to you. And if you're going to re-encode video, I suggest you look at the H.265 codec. It's intended for high resolution video, but still works very well for DVD - the resulting files are *much* smaller, and as long as the bitrate remains high enough, you won't be able to tell, visually, the difference with the originals. I would also imagine this sort of material is recorded (at best) with 2-channel stereo, and not wasting bits on 6-channels. H.265 takes longer to encode, and you need a somewhat faster processor to play it back in real time than older formats, but unless you're dealing with something like a 10-year old CPU, that should generally not be a problem nowadays. I'm late to this thread, but I hope there was something valuable in there.
dandy72 wrote:
would also imagine this sort of material is recorded (at best) with 2-channel stereo, and not wasting bits on 6-channels. H.265 takes longer to encode,
Current hardware from anyone here should be more than able to cope with it
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.
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Very helpful information! And yes, this material is mostly recorded lectures and demonstrations of how to analyze firearm failures, fabricate new parts, and fit them to make repairs. There's no fast parts, no high quality audio, just straight training. The originals I got 8 years ago were actually VHS recordings transferred to DVDs, so quality is really not a huge issue. Preserving the information is all that I care about, and having all of it in one physical place would be helpful simply to save space! With the new additions, I probably have 15' to 20' of shelf space needed.
Will Rogers never met me.
Roger Wright wrote:
With the new additions, I probably have 15' to 20' of shelf space needed.
Wow! Just think, you'll be able to carry this on a few MicroSD cards :-) ...and speaking of which: Large/cheap MicroSD cards and thumbdrives sold on Amazon (and other resellers) have been reported as downright fraudulent. Some cards will let you write to them, the OS report no error when writing, but the data's just missing. If you later try to re-read the files, there's nothing to be read back. So I wouldn't trust one of those until you know you can fill it and read it back. Steve Gibson has written [a tool](https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm) just for that verification purpose. Not that a MicroSD card of thumbdrive would be my first choice when it comes to long-term storage for data of this nature.
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dandy72 wrote:
would also imagine this sort of material is recorded (at best) with 2-channel stereo, and not wasting bits on 6-channels. H.265 takes longer to encode,
Current hardware from anyone here should be more than able to cope with it
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.
Nelek wrote:
Current hardware
Until about a year ago, I was still using an Atom CPU-based system to watch video files on my projector. For the longest time I went out of my way to avoid H.265 files 'cuz the system was using to view them was just stuttering all over the place. I replaced that system with the cheapest Beelink system I could find (you might have seen some of my posts ranting and raving about them) :-) and haven't had a single lost frame since. Even though it was an old Atom CPU, it still annoyed me a bit to have to replace it, as the machine was really single-purpose...for which it became unsuitable. Oh well.