Best Practices for ripping DVDs

[oliver]

I've just started digitizing my family's DVD collection and I am not sure I understand the best practices. My process currently looks like this:

I first rip the DVDs using MakeMKV to an mkv and I then use MKVToolNix to remove unwanted subtitles / audio tracks. Here is where my confusion starts: Some people then suggest transcoding the mkvs using something like Handbrake and some suggest just storing the remuxed mkvs from MKVToolNix.

My question are:

• What exactly does transcoding do, and should I do it?
  
• How would you / are you storing your DVD collection (.mkv, .mp4, transcoded, not transcoded...)
  
• What other things might I have overlooked that are good for storing / ripping DVDs
  

[TheDreadPirate]

Transcoding the rips is purely for reducing storage space. MPEG2 from DVDs is extremely inefficient compared to modern codecs. Even when compared to the aging H264 codec. Even 1080P blurays, which use H264, has room for significant compression if you are ok with a little quality loss.

If you plan on accessing your Jellyfin over the internet, pre-transcoding is also beneficial if you have limited upload bandwidth.

I pre-transcode all my media into MKV containers. Initially using Handbrake to encode with HEVC/H265, now using ffmpeg to encode with AV1.

A community member wrote a good start-to-finish guide.

https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-from-disc-t...r-jellyfin

[tmsrxzar]

pretty much everything should support mpeg2 by now but almost nothing concerning streaming will support a DVD structure

i would personally recommend MakeMKV to remux only to mkv, if you happen to have a 1% device that cannot do mpeg2 then setting up live transcoding on jellyfin would get used on-the-fly to send it to that client

it's sort of the whole reason for a transcode capable server, you don't have to do it ahead of time

as far as size, most common DVDs are 4.7GB up to a max of 8.5GB and that is the ENTIRE disc, once remuxed it should come down approx 10%-15% (or more) so storage cost is not that horrible