Want to digitise home movies.
Able to do half of collection myself with a used 8mm hi8 camcorder and a capture card in a computer.
Other half seems to be recorded using long play mode and camcorder can’t play them back properly.
Get them professionally digitised to save myself the hassle of looking for and gambling on another second hand hi8 camcorder being able to also playback long play.
Get tapes digitised to DVD discs.
First disc I test in the DVD player at home fails after a minute into the video.
Subsequent ones seem ok.
Take the ones that seem ok to the family desktop PC to try and rip. (away from my home and don’t have access to my own computers)
Family desktop struggles to play back any of them with VLC.
Struggles also to rip them with any burning software (IMGBurn, MakeMKV, Handbrake, DVD Decryptor), getting IO errors and super long wait times.
Do research and find that when discs contain errors, DVD players will persist and just skip over them and keep going, but computers will tend to halt and produce an error, convince myself that the issue is badly authored discs from the burning process.
Searching up any software that might be able to tolerate errors and work around them to extract as much data as possible.
Advice I’m reading on that suggests that while they may work the resulting image file of the disc will not be able to be successfully used to burn another disc that would be a copy of the original.
Text the professional that I’m having a bit of trouble reading the discs and enquire if he has still any digital copies from the process that he can just reburn to new discs. He replies that the way he does it is that the disc is burnt on the fly as the tape is read and as such would need the tape again to redo.
My belief is strengthened that the cause is bad burning (because burning on the fly just sounds like there must be no room for error!)
Take tapes back to the professional that digitised them.
He plays it in his DVD player and it plays perfectly, even the one problematic disc that didn’t play in my DVD player plays in his.
Curse under my breath.
Insist that the bad DVD didn’t play on my DVD player, he concedes that it was a bad burn because while it plays on his it glitches a lot around the one minute mark so offers to redo that one.
He says it’s probably the disc drive I was using at home couldn’t read them properly and that’s why they worked in my dvd player but not my computer.
I think I know better, for I have researched!
Challenge him to play back the others on his computer and not the DVD player, he does and they work perfectly, curse under my breath.
He offers me an external disc drive of his to test against my own laptop, I do and it is able to play back the discs perfectly.
Awesome, so the issue is confirmed just a bad drive in the family desktop PC!
Eventually get back to my own desktop PC, test the discs and VLC plays them, all good!
Use the dd command to make .iso files of the discs, followed by the diff command to verify that the .iso files match their discs and diff reports all good.
Occasionally test an image by mounting it in a virtual drive and getting VLC to play it, still seems all good.
Get through about ten or so before finding that some mysteriously mount with permissions that exlude me from reading their contents, even as sudo.
Furthermore find that some that do mount successfully, when played back in VLC, fail after about the one hour mark.
Scrutenise all the discs more now and find some where the diff command is failing but they seem to play ok?
What is going on ?!
Do some searching and find someone with similar issues to me, apparently some issue with the software he was using to mount the images ‘isomounter’ which is not what I’m using, in fact the recommendation given in that case was to do what I was already doing, no help there.
Do some more searching and find a casual mention that the dd command fails to grab everything off a disc when copy protection is in use on the disc, for example DVD movies. The suggestion is to use VLC to open the disc and when the menu is showing, pause VLC then use the dd command.
Try that on one disc and the results look promising! The resulting file is twice as large as it was the previous attempt.
VLC can’t play the mounted file though and I still don’t have permission to recurse into the mounted image’s directories!
After trying different things and more searching somehow find that the permission issue was happening because I wasn’t explicitly telling the mount command what type of filesystem the image was meant to be (iso9660). This was because I didn’t think it was necessary as the mount command is capable of automatically detecting the filesystem and seemed to be working the first couple of times I tried it with these images.
So after much trial and error and researching, below is the way to make backups of your digitised home movie DVD’s:
isoinfo -d -i /dev/sr0Sample output:
important lines:
Logical block size is: 2048
Volume size is: 2073168
dd if=/dev/sr0 bs=2048 count=2073168 of=myVideo.isocmp /dev/sr0 myVideo.isoto test the playback of the image you may run:
mkdir temp_mount_point
sudo mount -t iso9660 myVideo.iso temp_mount_point/ -o loop
then in VLC -> open directory and point it towards the temp_mount_point/ directory.
It should open as it did when it opened the disc.