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by walterbell 3461 days ago
What's the best software for lossless archival ripping?
4 comments

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Decrypter

[1] http://www.makemkv.com/

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.
Works via wine although some disks stopped working in recent years with the software at all that is not with wine
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.
MakeMKV preserves chapters.
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.
h.264 or h.265 is going to yield a much better compression ratio for equivalent quality, even after transcoding formats.

On the order of 2:1 or 3:1 vs MPEG2 format for DVD.

Lossy in top of lossy is never going to be the best approach for archival purposes, which is what the GP was looking for.

If the question was about balancing quality and file size I would've given a different answer.

You can just use bash to make a 1:1 copy:

  sudo cat /dev/sr0 > ~/example.iso