How to convert home-video DVDs to MP4

If you have a stack of DVDs sitting on a shelf — wedding videos, kids' recitals, old camcorder transfers, home movies a relative burned for you — this post is about getting the footage off those discs and into a format that can be played on smart phones and computers or saved safely to the cloud.

DVDs were the normal way to store home video for about fifteen years, from the late 1990s through around 2012. However, almost no computer sold today has a drive that can read them. And the discs themselves don't last forever. Recordable DVDs — the kind you'd put in a drive and write to, as opposed to the ones pressed at a factory for a movie you bought — have a dye layer that breaks down over time. Anything over 10 years old might no longer be salvagable.

One caveat: this article is only about discs you own that contain your own footage. Commercial movie DVDs are encrypted, and in the US getting around that encryption is illegal regardless of whether you bought the disc or not.

Tools You Need

First make sure you have an external USB DVD drive. They plug into any laptop with a USB port and cost about $25 to $40. You don't need one that burns discs, because you're not making discs. You just need one that reads them. Plug it in, drop a disc in, and the computer sees it the way it would have seen the internal drive on an older machine. If your computer already has a DVD drive built in, then you can use that and wont need an additional external drive.

What's on a video DVD

Before you convert anything, it helps to understand what you're looking at. Open the disc in a file browser and you'll see a folder called VIDEO_TS, with a bunch of files inside ending in .VOB, plus a few smaller files with names like VIDEO_TS.IFO. Those VOB files are the actual video. The IFO files tell a DVD player how the menu and chapters work.

Copy that entire VIDEO_TS folder off the DVD disc and onto your computer in a folder of your choice.

The next step is converting them to MP4 which is the format phones, TVs, laptops, and streaming boxes can play. It also takes a lot less space than the raw VOB files — a disc that's 4 GB of VOB can end up as a 1 GB MP4 with no visible drop in quality.

Software options

Four tools do this job well. Which one you want depends on how many discs you have and how much you want to fiddle with settings.

• Wondershare UniConverter (paid, Windows and Mac) is built for exactly this job. Point it at a disc or a VIDEO_TS folder, tell it you want MP4, and away it goes.
• Roxio Creator (Windows) / Roxio Toast (Mac) (paid, both from Corel) is the long-standing mainstream option that has been around for decades. Roxio is more of a full media suite than a single-purpose tool, but it will definitely get the job done.
• HandBrake (free, open source, Windows and Mac) converts a VIDEO_TS folder you've already copied off the disc. It handles conversion as well as Wondershare or Roxio, but the interface is harder to use. It forces you to configure presets, encoders, frame rates, audio tracks, etc. If you're technical and willing to tinker a little to get the right settings, then this is a solid option.

A single disc can take quite a while - up to an hour depending on how much data is on it, so converting 30 or 40 discs will definitely be a weekend project. The way people get through it is by batching — queueing up a stack of discs or folders before bed and letting the computer run overnight. The paid tools are better at this than HandBrake, which is part of why they're worth paying for if you have a lot of DVDs to convert.

If you want to trim out the dead space at the start of the recital, add a title card, or stitch a few clips together once the footage is in MP4 form, that's a separate step and I covered that in what video editing tool to use.

Where to put the finished files

Converting the disc and leaving the only MP4 on one laptop puts you right back where you started — one copy of something irreplaceable on a device that can fail. Pick at least two of these for additional backups:

• Your phone or tablet, for the clips you actually want to pull up and show people.
• A computer or external hard drive, as the main library.
• Cloud storage — Google Photos, iCloud, Dropbox, or a dedicated backup service — keeps copies somewhere other than your house.
• A home media server like Plex or Jellyfin, which lets the family watch the videos on the TV from a drive sitting on your network.

The same thinking from my three-part series on backing up family photos applies here. Three copies of each file using two kinds of media and one of them being offsite or in the cloud.

I recommend taking the steps above in the following order:

1. Copy the VIDEO_TS folder off each disc first. One folder per disc, named so you know what's in each one (e.g. by year, then month, etc).
2. Convert the folders to MP4 using one of the tools mentioned above — one at a time if you have a few, in overnight batches if you have a lot.
3. Make a second copy of the MP4s somewhere other than the computer you made them on.