I have used both ddrescue and Brasero to rip commercial CSS protected dvds in the past.
I know the packages required, and about libdvdcss2, and how all that works.
Does libdvdcss2 still defeat 'Content Scramble System', or have they (the movie industry) upgraded?
ddrescue seems to work best, but it won't copy certain dvds, and I have installed both libdvdcss2 and Ubuntu Restricted Extras.
What now?
I was able to make a DVD bitwise copy with the command ddrescue --no-scrape /dev/scd0 output.iso from my cygwin bash command prompt, when the dd command would fail due to bad sectors as part of the DVD copy protection scheme.
The --no-scrape option may have caused the loss of an iframe at the beginning of one of the titles, but saved a lot of time in analysing the DVD.
I found that gem on the VLC website.
In case you want to have a 1:1 iso image of the DVD which can be played directly in some media player or mounted with the image mounter, you can just use Brasero after installing libdvdcss2. Choose the 1:1 copy and select an image file as target.
In general there are some DVD that have additional protections. In some cases it helps to try playing the DVD in different media players first.
Handbrake isn't exactly a 1:1 copy. It worked for me with a troublesome dvd, but without converting it wasn't best format to play on my 1GHz AMD Series-6 (hey its still capable of playing MPEG2 in HD and it's not main PC)
You might also run into problems with old tv/players and those new formats. I would try with makemkv first as it does use libdvdcss2 and does convert into a container format from which you can get something a lot closer to original. You can try dvdrecord too which uses libdvdcss as well I think, but just copy it to your HD. You can then make a DVD copy to a writeable DVD.
I understand why they are protecting their products. But it is frustrating not make a true copy for your personal use whether it is preserve and backup to compact library in a time where >8TB disks become more and more common. Esp. since DVDs are mostly a thing of the past that we cling onto and everyone are streaming anyway.
Make MKV will simply backup your DVD as mkv files (one for the main content, and separate ones for the others, if there are any). The VOB files are joined and put in the new container without altering the streams (no re-encoding).
In 20.04 it is available from PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:heyarje/makemkv-beta
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install makemkv-bin
The program is also available as snap here. A snap needs supplementary access to the dvd drive as said here:
snap connect makemkv:optical-write
snap connect makemkv:removable-media
Assuming you own the DVD, use MakeMKV to rip it into an MKV. The MKV can then be converted with Handbrake, or your weapon of choice, if needed. You also need to install libdvdcss2, I thought MakeMKV took care of this but it was a good while ago that I installed it.
