How to rip a dvd (probably also works with cds, etc) on gnu/linux (probably also works on other *nix systems such as macos and openbsd)

Yeah this won’t work with 99.9 percent of DVDs or Blu-ray because of the DRM and the way the drives behave, not sure why you’d even post this.

• MakeMKV (get it on flathub, easier than building from source) and the beta key from their forum.
• Dump the entire disc into a directory.
• Use mkisofs -udf -allow-limited-size -input-charset "utf-8" -V "your_disc_title" -o output_name.iso source_folder/

Edit: Fixed command typo and added flathub.

This makes an exact copy with DRM and all.

DVD encryption has been completely broken and that's why there is free software for playing DVDs.

BluRay encryption has not been and has effectively prevented me from bying any BluRays. Wasted money on a drive way back when bying my current desktop and I didn't realize this. Tried some commercial software, but they neither didn't seem to reliably play the movies from library I tested with or triggered some more advanced DRM on the disc.

This should work with some caveats.

1. Tbis probably won't work on WSL (Linux needs direct access to your hardware).
2. For DVDs, you need to be sure libdvdcss is installed for this to work correctly

• You probably already have this on your system if you have successfully watched a dvd in Linux.

3. You may need to replace /dev/cdrom with the name of the device file corresponding to your drive.

• See https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Optical_disc_drive#Learning_the_name_of_your_optical_drive.

4. This creates an exact copy of the disk, including the unallocated space. You would probably want to follow the guide https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Optical_disc_drive#Creating_an_ISO_image_from_a_CD,_DVD,_or_BD

• (@BustedPancake@lemmy.world's use of mkisofs does the same thing because they copy the files on the disk rather than the whole disk. But you don't need makemkv. You should be able to use any method of copying the files and Linux should use libdvdcss to decrypt them.).

::: spoiler “deep magic” Linux trys to treat devices like files. If you ran xxd /dev/cdrom, you would see every bit on the disk (not just those of the files, but those in the free space as well) in order from the first to the last (converted to base-16 in what is called a hexdump). Not that you need to see this, but your video player does. The “DRM cracking” is actually a feature of libdvdcss that makes it possible for the system to treat the disk this way. dd is just a general copying command and if Stack Exchange is to be believed, it isn't necessarily the best option (https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/12532/dd-vs-cat-is-dd-still-relevant-these-days). But it probably is necessary for the linked guide to work because it has dd truncate the file. :::

edit: caveats is note spalled caceats

edit: file → files on the disk

@original_ish_name
if this works then every ripping guide on every tracker is about to be prettyyyyy embarrassed