In fact, there are many ways, both legal and illegal, to do so. I will stick with the legal ways here.

Well, really, there’s only one legal choice: rip them. Store them on a hard drive somewhere, and use that storage as a backup and an easy way to play them. Simple, right?

Not quite. There are dozens of different formats and options to choose from when ripping, storing and playing back DVDs. Let’s cover a few of the most popular ways.

1. Make a copy of the disc to a blank DVD. I don’t like this option. You aren’t solving all of the problems, and adding more: it costs money to buy the blanks, they are one of the more expensive media to backup things too, and they aren’t the most reliable of things. Plus, some DVDs are dual-layered, and dual-layered blanks are even more expensive.
2. Backup the entire disc to your hard drive. As in, drag-and-drop to copy the entire VIDEO_TS folder onto your hard drive. Really, this is not too bad. Programs like VLC can play it back directly, without decrypting it or otherwise converting it. This method also saves all of the extra features, and the movie will be at full quality. However, this comes at a cost: upwards of 9 GB per disc ripped! Even a 1 TB hard drive can’t hold more than about 200 or so movies this way.
3. Convert it to an AVI/MP4. For example, with HandBrake, my preferred ripper. HandBrake even has presets for optimal settings for many popular devices, like iPods, PS3, etc., so that you can be sure that your ripped movie will play correctly on your device. I’d really recommend avoiding the AVI format though: it’s an old, Windows-centric container format that doesn’t support a lot of newer video codecs fully, and barely works (when it does at all) on many systems, like the PS3. MP4 is a much more modern format, and I’d recommend sticking to it from now on. HandBrake runs best on Macs, but I’ve heard that its Linux and Windows support has been very good.

Personally, I typically copy the entire contents to my hard drive first (the 2nd recommendation), and then I will queue up a bunch of HandBrake jobs to convert several of them at once overnight. HandBrake’s pretty fast, though: movies often rip 3 or 4 times faster than it takes to watch them.

Post from: EveryJoe