Emil Muzz

My first experience with the internet was in the early 90s, when our high school computer science class went to a programming competition held at one of the state universities. While wandering through the library I came across a gopher terminal attached to the campus mainframe. It wasn’t much, and at one point I thought I locked it up, but tapping through hyperlinks on that amber monochrome display felt pretty amazing to me at the time.

Replying to say dd is probably the better method for archival, but this works for me in most cases.

This should work for -most- DVDs, unless they’re using some unique copy protection.

The following packages are needed: dvdbackup, libdvdcss, cdrtools

To get info on an inserted DVD (and check it can be read): dvdbackup -i /dev/sr0 -I

To rip the DVD to a directory (-M will mirror the disc): dvdbackup -i /dev/sr0 -o /path/to/store/dvd/ -M

And then to write the directory contents to an iso image: mkisofs -dvd-video -udf -o /path/to/save/movie.iso /path/of/ripped/dvd

From there you can archive the iso, mount it for playback, etc. My next step was a combination of MakeMKV and Handbrake to encode the main movie (H.265 MKV 480p30) for storage on a media server.

I’ll second this as someone who used to administer an AMI headend. This is essentially an industrial wifi access point. This device connects to the utility’s operations network, and provides connectivity to smart meters in the area.