I’ve got some self-recorded DVDs, a mixture of DVD-RW, DVD-R and DVD+R. Ideally I’d like to make copies onto my HDD which I can play using VLC and then copy to a DVD-R.
Can I just create an iso file from the disk? I’ve been using
sudo dd if=/dev/sr0 of=~/IOM.iso bs=4M status=progress
then Brasero to write a disk, but Brasero says
The format of the disc image could not be identified. Please set it manually.
That should work, assuming the original DVDs were good. Your IOM.iso file will be owned by the root user the way you’ve run that command. You might need to run sudo chown "$USER:" ~/IOM.iso to fix the file permissions.
If the DVD has imperfections, the ddrescue command might be able to recover the image.
I’ve changed the ownership, it didn’t affect the result, but was a good idea thing to do anyway. ddrescue looks useful.
[major edit]
ddrescue wasn’t showing in Gnome software so I searched online and was only offered a tarball that needed compilation (an absolute no-no). However it is available to install from the command line! I don’t know why that is, I’ll have to watch out for it.
ddrescue should be available in the default Fedora repos.
$ dnf search ddrescue
Last metadata expiration check: 3:20:38 ago on Thu Aug 22 16:37:01 2024.
========================================================================================== Name Exactly Matched: ddrescue ==========================================================================================
ddrescue.x86_64 : Data recovery tool trying hard to rescue data in case of read errors
Yes, I’ve edited my post 
What does file ~/IOM.iso report? It should say “ISO 9660 CD-ROM filesystem data”.
/home/chris/IOM.iso: data
I think something is wrong with your copy. Does the size look right?
Yes 4.7GB. My attempt with
sudo ddrescue if=/dev/sr0 of=~/new1.iso
gives
ddrescue: if=/dev/sr0: Can’t open input file: No such file or directory
ChatGPT says
sudo ddrescue -b 2048 /dev/sr0 ~/new1.iso ~/new1.log
That’s working.
Once you have a valid image containing an ISO 9660 filesystem, then you should be able to mount it with sudo mount -o ro ~/IOM.iso /mnt and then browse its contents with ls /mnt.
Thanks that gives me something to get on with. I’ll worry about the format of the file later.
An iso is good for copying to disk and I hope it will work even if the source and destination disks are different types (DVD-RW to DVD-R for example).
I don’t think there is a tidy format for a DVD when it’s on a HDD.
Both brasero and k3b are able to create an iso9660 image file on the hdd the same as if it were being directly burned onto the dvd.
In my understanding that is the tidy format that you are referring to with your comment.
This is the exact same image that would be gotten by using dd to copy from the actual dvd to an image on the hdd (assuming the dvd contains an iso 9660 file system).
mount: /mnt: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/loop2, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.
dmesg(1) may have more information after failed mount system call.
chris@UNKNOWN:~$
I understand about isos/ I don’t think I can play a HDD iso in VLC can I? Maybe if I mount it first?
I just meant that when I have previously copied a DVD to HDD it gives a top level directory with various other files and directories under it and I have to fiddle about in VLC to find the right one to start with. I was wondering whether there might be a special file type that contained it all like a tarball or an equivalent of a PNG file - a sort of wrapper.
Your file doesn’t seem to be what we expect it should be. What does the wipefs command report if you pass it your file (i.e. wipefs ~/IOM.iso)? Don’t worry, as long as you don’t pass any other options, wipefs won’t do anything except print the offsets of the partitions and filesystems within the image file.
Playing with vlc should be relatively easy, try vlc dvd:///path/to/dvd.iso. The gui equivalent is opening vlc, then ctrl + d and just open the iso. I do this a lot with ripped blu ray disks and I kept the directory structure instead of formatting as an iso, but it should work the same with an iso. Afaik you shouldn’t have to mount the iso first but if you want to mount it, assuming you mount to /mnt/dvd, vlc dvd:///mnt/dvd.
I just meant that when I have previously copied a DVD to HDD it gives a top level directory with various other files and directories under it and I have to fiddle about in VLC to find the right one to start with. I was wondering whether there might be a special file type that contained it all like a tarball or an equivalent of a PNG file - a sort of wrapper.
You should be able to open a directory as a disk the same way I described with an iso above: vlc dvd:///path/to/dvd-directory.
Take what I say with a grain of salt though, I don’t have any homemade dvds so all my experience is with movies that I bought. I don’t know if there any differences that make what I say incorrect. If you can copy the output of the vlc commands, that could be helpful.
Also, I assume you’re encountering issues with the iso you created because when you run the dd command with sudo, it will spit out an iso to /root instead of /home/chris, because that’s how ~ expands. So maybe try using absolute paths instead of ~? Although I think I might be misunderstanding the issue and I might be wrong on this one.
DEVICE OFFSET TYPE UUID LABEL
IOM.iso 0x8001 udf 2f2160004c424741 LG Vdr
It seems like you ought to be able to mount that then. The mount command still doesn’t work?
I may be misunderstanding.
It seems you would like the files contained within the dvd to be on the hdd in a way that they are usable for playing multimedia. Is that correct?
If that is the ideal then there may be other ways to achieve this.
Those self created dvds could simply be mounted and copy the existing files onto your hdd, then use brasero or k3b to create the new project containing the files you want onto the new dvd.
No, it still doesn’t work.