Rest assured that there are archivists ripping their discs losslessly somewhere in the dark corners of the internet. Hidden because the copyright mafia will otherwise ruin their lives.
I once knew of a group like this. eventually, thy disappeared - but it was the most wonderful way to access otherwise unavailable arthouse and experimental cinema. I miss it.
Experienced the same. I never got into this via IRC. My main thing was music genres, but also on the side quite some non-fiction(documentaries), and a few fiction. I met some awesome people on Soulseek and went from there into DCPP and FTP. This was around 2007-9. DCPP being the frontend for the users. It was a gentlemen's club and from there you just meet different people who see your collection and who invite you into different circles. Back then, there was an auto trader app written in Java, using self signed SSL certificates (w/o pinning). I never understood why they didn't just use rsync over SSH, but it takes more than 1 person to change such habits.
sc? i used to knew a few groups like this that concentrated on obscure arthouse films, but i've long since forgotten their names about from sc. there was another one that had something to do with a crow i think. hmm.
I actually can't remember. I was a teenager then and budding cinephile. I stumbled on an invitation to the group through an online acquaintance in a completely unrelated message board.
It was an adventure to be able to pull down obscure work from people I'd never heard of previously. As it goes, a lot of the stuff was above my head - but occasionally I'd stumble on something amazing and go deep on that creator. Later, my university had a very good cinema library. You had to request films my name, necessitating research and sapping some of the adventure of chance.
I have used DVD Decrypter [0] (unfortunately Windows-only) to make ISOs from DVDs. All the menus are retained, so I can still access special features (image galleries, character profiles, etc.).
I also hear good things about MakeMKV [1], which apparently allows some sort of lossless ripping of video files (I haven't used it, so I cannot confirm this), although the MKV format does not support menus.
I'll second DVD Decrypter. I archive DVDs with that, then use handbrake to pull all the useful bits (the film and special features, or programs in the case of TV series) for Kodi.
I've generally used MakeMKV to get from protected-source to open-copy, but still as MPEG-2 streams without any loss / transcoding. That's not what you'd use as an archivist - you would want something that does structure-level copying instead, so you get menus and chapters and whatnot. Unless you're talking about archiving just the feature, then it's about perfect and lets you preserve everything you care about in a single file.
This is an interesting one, in that most data on DVDs is already stored in lossy formats (such as MPEG-2 for video https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Video ). The best form of preservation is to rip the contents as a DVD ISO, which will use the same video and audio formats, as well as preserving extra features like the DVD menus. Any DVD ripper that can rip to a DVD ISO format and perform checksums on the ripped contents will suffice.