DVD Ripping – How to Rip a Scratched DVD-Video

backupdvdrippingvideo

I usually use the very nice and simple dvdbackup program to rip and backup my DVD-Video.

However some of my DVDs have a few scratches and my DVD drive has some trouble reading a few sectors. So, is there a tool similar to cdparanoia, but for DVDs?

Best Answer

ddrescue

You can try ddrescue. I read recommendation for it, but I do not have experience.

There are two programs called ddrescue (see https://askubuntu.com/questions/211578/whats-the-difference-between-ddrescue-gddrescue-and-dd-rescue). Gnu ddrescue is the newer one and designed to overcome some of the problems in the older ddrescue.

Gnu ddrescue uses a map file and is able to write many times to the same output file without doing the same work again or overwrite previous successful reads. It will instead try to fill in the holes by looking at the map file to find out which sectors to try to read again.

The suggested usage for DVDs (from the Gnu ddrescue manual) is:

ddrescue -n -b2048 /dev/cdrom cdimage mapfile
ddrescue -d -r1 -b2048 /dev/cdrom cdimage mapfile

The first line will extract the easily readable data from the DVD. Second line will use direct disc access to try to read more and write it to the same output file.

k3b

I have good personnal experience with K3b, with proper settings: k3b --copy <device>

You get a large window, and a small copying window. Ignore the large one. You must click advanced setting in the small one. Then you click on "ignore reading errors" so that it will not stop at the first error. You also fix the number of reading attempts to a fairly low value since repeats can sometimes take a long time. I often set it at 1 on my first attempt, just to check how many sectors give me trouble.

If you click on options you can choose to only produce an ISO image on disk. And after clicking on image you can choose where to save it. Very often, a few missing sectors will not even be noticeable (even a few hundreds). But it all depends on where they are. K3b will tell you which sectors cannot be read.

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