revisiting dvd backups

Someone had been gifted a box set of 16 DVDs, but they were unable to play them due to region restrictions. They asked me for help. So, revisited DVD Decrypter after more than 15 years. Still works fine on Windows, except that with Win10, while exiting, it gives a few error dialog boxes, 'Failed to set data for '' ' and so on. 

On Linux, DVD Decrypter under Wine is supposed to work with SCSI emulation, but I was unable to get it to recognize the DVD drive - the links in ~/.wine/dosdevices  f:: and f: are being automatically assigned correctly to link to the device /dev/sr0 in my case and the mount point respectively, so probably the need is to go to nt40 mode. But my .wine directory did not have a config file, as mentioned in the howto section at

https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=2587

and even creating a config file did not solve the issue. Probably someone who knows more about wine can get it to work. There are also other options as mentioned in the old wiki page at

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/RippingDVDs

But my purpose was served by dvdbackup. Handbrake also worked, but I wanted a decrypted copy which I would encode later, so I used dvdbackup instead.

sudo apt install libdvdcss2

sudo apt install handbrake

sudo apt install dvdbackup 

mkdir new12

cd new12

 dvdbackup -i /dev/sr0 -M -v

and in another window, 

 watch du -sh new12

to see the progress as the GBs get added.

The macbook's DVD drive worked fine, as also the Windows desktop's drive. But the Lenovo laptop's DVD drive seemed to be more sensitive to scratches. The macbook's drive was probably the best. Decrypting and writing to hard drive was probably limited by DVD drive's speed, around 4x, taking 20-25 minutes per disc.

Encoding with handbrake directly from DVD on the macbook was going at approx 23 fps for the "Fast 576p" encoding method, while on the newer Samsung Galaxy Book2, handbrake encoding with the decrypted files on hard disk was going at 130 fps for "Fast 576p" and 250 fps for "Very fast 576p" - and so I went for the latter, reasonable quality. With such speeds, each disc would get encoded in under 10 minutes.