Don't want to COC myself, so if not allowed, nuke my thread.

Wife wants to get rid of my under TV stand.  All it is there for is storing DVDs.  

Based on maybe a hundred DVDs, how much time would I need to rip all of them to a USB connected hard drive?  Will the disc features still work the same after the rip, or will things be missing like scene selection, extras, etc?

If discussion is allowed, what program would you suggest I use to accomplish this?  I figure this is no different than when we all ripped our music CDs to our Ipods as far as licensing things are concerned.  

Cheers!

Ripping legally-owned DVDs for your own private use is not illegal, so no COCs will be harmed in this thread.

Ripping is a pretty processor-intensive process, as your computer is literally ripping the DVD apart frame by frame.  Movies are usually 35-60 frames per second.  Depending on the quality you choose for your output, the length of the movie, and the "horsepower" of your machine, you're looking at many minutes or even an hour or more per movie.  It certainly won't be 5 minutes per movie or something like that.

ETA: You'll likely lose the DVD funcationality.  You'll still be able to watch the "extras," but they'll simply be different video files that you'd have to individually select.

Thumb drives break.  It should only be considered a secondary source for storing data and not a primary source.

If your goal is to make a mirror image of the dvds, you can make "iso" files of the DVD and capture all of the retained features.

To watch said DVD you would have to "mount the iso" file to a disk drive (a virtual task a program performs that mimics putting a physical DVD in your DVD slot of your computer). When you "mount" the disk it will function the same way it would if you put a physical DVD in the DVD tray.


If your goal is ripping the movies on a flash drive so you can play the files from your flash drive directly on your TV, you will lose all of the extra stuff.

Don't quote me on this, but I'm pretty sure you can file share (download) copies of movies if you own the physical copy. It's no different than ripping it. I would just make sure you have a VPN to remove headaches from them thinking you are just pirating it.

Whatever you do, make 2 or 3 backups, thumb drives break all the time.

Others have mentioned Extras.  But based on this Plex article, you can do chapters as well - https://support.plex.tv/articles/200289526-library/

I have done this with a TV series as a test and it's not difficult.  But I also work at home and home PC is on my same desk I sit at for 8 hours a day.  I just used a Plex type naming convention and saved the files as MP4.  I store them on a NAS running a RAID array so I don't have do this again.  The NAS has a DLNA media server and my Roku box has a media player built in.  They connect, I drill down to the appropriate folder and pick an episode to watch.  Using Plex or Jellyfin would give me a nice, Netflix like interface and that's my next step.

The part bolded in red.  Yes, theoretically, you're not breaking the law by downloading torrents of movies you already own.  However, most torrent downloaders are also uploading as they download.  And it's the uploading part, you basically sharing the torrent for others to download, which causes most folks to run afoul of copyright law.  

This is a bit more complicated than you might think.  Ripping your DVDs on to a hard drive is the easy part.  I rip using MakeMKV, but there are several programs that can do it.  The real problem to solve is playback.

I'm not aware of any TVs, smart or otherwise, that can just "play" a DVD .iso, or just the video file taken from that .iso.  You are going to need a device to play back these files.  Plex has already been mentioned, and is what I use personally, but if you are ONLY wanting to watch at one TV then Kodi may be a simpler option.  Still going to need a computer to run it though, and may need to do some transcoding of your rips to make them play nice.

Most modern tvs will play mp4s or mkvs directly from a flash drive plugged into the TV. Mine does and is about 5 years old.

I agree on the isos. I dont know of any tv that can play an iso.