So in preparation for ship life, I'm rushing to rip my DVDs to my external hard drive. Don't whine about legality, it's perfectly fine for personal use. It's illegal to use your rips in non-personal ways, and it's illegal to distribute software to bypass copy protection schemes. So shame on the guys who developed the wonderful software I'm using to rip my personal collection of DVDs and Blu-rays, they're technically breaking the law. But I most certainly am not.

Some laws are just ridiculous… making such software illegal because it can be used for illegal activities, even though it has perfectly valid legal uses, is as absurd as making the sale of cars illegal because they can be used in illegal ways.

Anyway, I calculated that I'd need to rip just under 4 discs a day starting from July 1st to have all of 'em ripped by my deadline of September 22nd. I'm quite ahead of schedule at over 35 discs. And even better is that I'm actually transcoding most of these to h.264 in the process, with the exception of a few that have copy protection schemes that force me to use MakeMKV for ripping instead of HandBrake.

HandBrake is easily my favorite video transcoding software. Free, clean and powerful. Not to mention cross-platform. It's not capable of transcoding video from copy-protected discs however (including all Blu-rays), so for those I'm forced to rip with other software first.

MakeMKV is currently my favorite ripping software. Like HandBrake, it's free, clean, powerful and cross-platform. Handles most copy-protected discs, including most Blu-rays, like a champ. As the name implies, it outputs MKV files, which is great for preserving multiple audio and subtitle tracks. And since the majority of my DVDs are anime with multiple audio and subtitle tracks, this is quite nice. Not only that, but MakeMKV doesn't butcher the video by transcoding it. I prefer to do all my quality transcoding with HandBrake, so the fact that MakeMKV doesn't try to do a half-assed transcode is a godsend.

HandBrake and MakeMKV compliment each other perfectly. Anyone looking to backup their personal DVD/Blu-ray collection should try these out first.

And for playback, naturally the free, clean, powerful and cross-platform VLC media player fits the bill perfectly. Some might argue that there are better players out there, but VLC has never failed me. And these supposedly better players are either Windows/Linux-only or have truly atrocious Mac ports.