What do you folks use to rip you dvds, cds etc to a digital copy. I am not interested in pirating, but I do have some media that I would like to safeguard with digital backups.
Hands… down. (Get it?)
EDIT: If you’re not going to rip, convert, compress, or shrink, why not just “dd” them as disc image archives / ISOs?
I essentially want them to go from CD > MP4 or similar format.
mkv is “famous” enough to play everywhere. ffmpeg is a good, very capable piece of code. Most things are wrappers for that utility.
2nd the ffmpeg suggestion.
Start here:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Rip_Audio_CDs
The principle is the same for Audio->MP3 as it is for most other formats. The link above gives you a link to other optical drive format ripping tools. -i.e. once you have the files ripped from the opt drive/media you then do things like convert, or concat with tools like ffmpeg.
I’ll give handbrake a shot and see how it goes.
At first glance it appears handbrake does not support DVD drives.
I basically want to rip a DVD to a file.
It most definitely does. I’ve used it on many DVDs* myself.
*Legally acquired, Linux ISO DVD movies… 
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Go on…
Do you just select the DVD drive, or the file inside it?
The DVD drive.
Are you on Linux, Windows, or Mac?
I used DVD Decrypter, but newer programs exist such as MakeMKV and DVDFab.
Windows for this one.
I’m on Linux, but do you see “Detected DVD devices” at the bottom of the file selector, when you click the “Open Source” button from the application’s main window?
Change it from “Not selected” to “DVD Drive” or whatever it’s detected as on Windows.
If that doesn’t work, just open up the file VIDEO_TS.IFO in the DVD drive’s root folder with the “Detected DVD drive” option set to your DVD drive. It will do the same thing as “opening a DVD”.
You’ll hear the drive spin up as it reads all the titles and chapters.
Keep in mind, you’ll likely only want “Title 1” or whatever the main movie is. Otherwise, you’ll end up saving “bonus tracks” and “trailers” and a bunch of other stuff.
You can even have it save all subtitle tracks (or only specific ones), which will be “soft subs” that can be toggled in the resulting MKV or MP4. (Preferably MKV as the output container.)
MakeMKV. Probably my most used application (Handbrake is second).
As for CDs, XLD is the gold standard among audiophiles. Once you get it configured, ripping a CD is a one-click operation.
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I can see it now. But it’s complaining about DRM.
On my Arch Linux computer, I have libdvdcss installed. This is the library used to get around DRM protection for your own legally acquired DVDs.
Handbrake has since stopped bundling libdvdcss.
For Windows, you can do this.
MakeMKV is a great utility to strip DRM. It works on most DVDs and with exceptions, blu-ray as well. Ideally, get a libredrive-flashed blu-ray drive, which can also read DVDs and CDs.
Handbrake is a great utility to shrink the MKV files to something much more manageable. Just how small you want the files / how high you want the quality is something you will have to determine inside handbrake.
For example, the chip-specific codecs (intel quicksync or whatever) can be super fast but I didn’t like the quality. I go with super high quality, CPU intensive conversions instead.
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As I said, I am not interested in pirating at all. But I do want to keep a backup of my stuff.
Handbrake can still not open the disc with the above “solution”
Giving MakeMKV a try now…
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Soon we will have the “Year of the Windows Desktop”. Until then, Linux is king. 
MakeMKV is working for this.
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