My partner’s grandmother has passed and has left a collection of hundreds possibly thousands of DVDs. These range from official releases to pirated and bootleg copies.
What would be the best way to digitize and archive this collection? Is there an external device out there that will let me burn and convert the DVDs? I’d want to possibly upload on archive.org if the copyright expired, store on backblaze or maybe another digital archiving site besides a regular torrent, would appreciate any recs on sites and advice in general. I haven’t gone through these yet but figure the project would be a fun learning experience.
I would not bother archiving the mainstream releases that can already be found on many torrent sites (like, you don’t need to archive Star Wars or Lord of the Rings) and focus on the bootleg disks first. You just need any standard DVD drive, then use Handbreak to rip the disks to a video file. For official releases, many of them have forms of copy protection, but 15 minutes on Google should tell you how to get around any you come across.
Also, for reference, “burning” a DVD is writing data to a disk, so the opposite of what you’re trying to do.
Depends on the version. Some versions of older films that have been remastered can be quite sought after.