The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/ImaginaryTango on 2025-06-30 17:58:02.
Short Version: I rip anything I buy on physical digital media to my server. (I keep the media, so I'm basically doing it for convenience and preservation, not so I can resell the media.) I use MakeMKV for ripping and a lot of the time there is no issue, but I need a way to rip video files from a damaged DVD. MakeMKV won't do that, so I need something more fault tolerant.
Long Version: I've asked about this on the MakeMKV forum and I've had it explained to me that MKV is to make a perfect copy of the original media. But DVDs are notorious for having flaws in them. I find ways to work around crappy DVD authoring programs, but when there's a physical flaw in the media, MakeMKV can't rip it. It's incapable of passing over an error and reconstructing the data stream after that. Most of the time (over 99.5% of the time) my discs are never played in a player, just ripped to my server, then stored. My understanding is that DVD/BD players are designed to keep going, so if there's a problem on the DVD, it'll keep looking for the next readable part and start playback from there. It may amount to nothing a human can notice, or it may show a glitch, or even jump to a few seconds later in the video. I can't find any ripping programs that can behave like this - that can handle an error in a DVD without failing to rip the file.
If my understanding is wrong or there is something I can do to read a damaged DVD with MakeMKV, I would love to hear about it.
(I had one TV series that was seriously damaged and bought a new version, that was bad, and found, over a year of trying, that the quality of DVDs from Acorn Media - is far worse than any other source I've dealt with. It's impossible to buy a season of a TV show from them and not find multiple episodes unreadable for the reason above. So when I want a show they publish, there's no way to rip the entire season due to this problem.)