I have been ripping all my retail DVD's to my HD for about 2 years now and I'm wondering if there is a better way to do this. I rip from DVD to HD using DVDfab. I join the main movie VOB's with VOBmerge and I delete the rest. I then use 7zip to compress and I store it away. Recently I have been thinking if I should convert my VOB files to another format. I haven't converted because I hear you lose quality. But now I'm about to fill a 1tb drive and wonder if I can save space by converting to another format. Most of my regular DVD's take up 5-7gb. I tried converting to MKV using handbrake but the MKV file took up more space than the VOB. Should I just keep doing it like I am or is there a better way?
What are you trying to accomplish? Just storage? You should be able halve the VOB size with a x264 MKV, while producing nearly identical PQ.
I'm looking for the most efficient way to go about ripping and storing DVD's. I want to save space, maintain quality, and have easy play back without having to do a million things.
