I’ve never ripped CDs or DVDs before for any reason and am curious how this works since I have some stuff I wanna see about backing up but am nervous about ruining the disc. I’ve tried looking this up, but every time I do, I obviously am searching for the wrong thing because I have never found the info I’m looking for.
Christ do I feel old now. CDs and DVDs are read only, so you won’t do anything to them by ripping them. It’s just a copy of the data onto your drive and then probably a compression step of some sort. Nowadays it probably takes less than five minutes for the whole thing. I remember taking at least half an hour on a 2x drive, and then mp3 compression taking another hour or so.
But many of my collections of discs want to be backed up or converted to ISO format for storage. I don’t think copying discs makes them unplayable. On the contrary, I think this is beneficial to preservation and reduces damage to the disc. Because I am an avid fan of physical discs, I have a large collection of DVDs, Blu-rays and even 4K UHD physical discs. I have tried many software, and so far DVDFab should be the best software for lossless DVD copy.
Discs are harder to ruin than they’re made out to be. My best example is a physical copy of grand theft auto san Andreas for the original Xbox. I got a free old copy that was considered useless, because it wouldn’t read, the shiny side of the disc was scratched pretty deeply. I took it to the game store and told them “I know this probably won’t work, but humor me, run this through the resurfacer please”, which cost me $2. They have a $30,000 machine which actually grinds an even surface on the shiny side, adding a new layer of plastic they said, but it did in fact work first try. I still use that disc to play the game with no issues whatsoever. If anything, it’s the least glitchy copy of GTA I own physically.
If you look at the layers, the shiny side (bottom) of a CD is a thick layer of plastic. The data is actually on the other side of that plastic, protected by a thin sheet of aluminum foil and lacquer on top. Even a deep scratch on the bottom is unlikely to reach the data, so resurfacing should be very effective.
However, a deep scratch on the top can easily puncture the metallic layer and damage the actual data.
DVDs and Blu-ray have extra layers and are a bit more complicated, but it’s a similar design
I learned that data was on the top side at a very young age. I put a sticker on top of a CD and a couple years later peeled it off and the image came off too. I tried to play the CD and realized my mistake. I think I was around 7. Luckily it was just kid’s Christmas songs and nothing important lol.
there’s no way this is a real post. why are people giving real answers to it? I hate Reddit
I was actually serious about this. I may have grown up with DVDs and CDs, but that doesn’t mean I understand how exactly they fully function when ripped. Especially since I grew up in the transition period between everything being on CD/DVD to either moving online or to SD cards.
