Introduction - Ripping DVDs

In this post, I will discuss the state of play regarding DVD and Blu-ray playing and ripping in Linux in 2026.

Ripping DVDs and Blu-rays is still as important to me now in the way I watch content as it ever has been. I still buy and enjoy physical media. I will rip these from an external drive to Linux, which then sit on an NFS mount. I then use Kodi on my Xbox to watch them. This works so well for me and I've done this since the days of XBMC on the OG Xbox.

For those that don't know, Content Scramble System is used to encrypt disc content. A licensed private key is used to decrypt. These are typically purchased by manufacturers and used in playback software on the device itself. This is not a key a consumer can buy.

Not all DVDs are encrypted or scrambled (I will use these terms interchangeably) but the context here, is that they are.

Firstly a rant; watching/ripping a DVD in Linux is still as ridiculous in 2026 as it was when I first started using Linux over a quarter of a century ago. This is because it is still technically illegal, and most Linux distributions (understandably) do not ship with the tools to decrypt CSS. Decryption of DVD content without a licensed key ultimately depends on either DeCSS or libdvdcss - both of which are cracking methods and absolutely copy protection circumvention in my humble opinion.

So even in 2026, Linux users still cannot legally playback the content for which they have paid.

Thoughts on MakeMKV

For most people, this is probably the easiest option to rip DVD or Blu-ray content.

MakeMKV is a single tool which actually works really well but, has some aspects I finds unacceptable:

  • At least partially proprietary - Making a bad situation worse and profiting from it. I find this deeply offensive.

  • Needs a License key ("free for beta use") - unacceptable.

  • Forum and website are trash - Mostly "help me bro" type posts. Website was down at the time of writing.

Solutions

Rather than rip individual chapters from the DVD, my approach is just to rip the whole thing to an ISO and play it back in Kodi exactly as if I was using the disc.

We need to do two things:

  • "Unlock" the drive and enable the CSS content to be read

  • Dump the ISO in the normal way. The ubiquitous DD is perfect for this

Unlock the drive

There are a two methods I have used.

DeCSS

Download and build https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/css-auth/css-auth.tar.gz

Install the tstdvd and reset binaries. Run the reset command then tstdvd

A script I used for using these tools for years can be found here - which may be useful.

libdvdcss

In itself, this is just a library, but a tool can easily be written to unlock the drive as the DeCSS tools do. I wrote one which I use - dvdunlock, another example (which I did not write) is dvdopen

Backup entire disc

dd if=/dev/sr0 of=/<output_file.iso> bs=2048 status=progress