(UPDATED 7/14/2026) If you're someone who's interested in collecting physical media, especially DVDs and blu-rays, I cannot overstate how good an investment a blu-ray drive for your computer is.
There are copious free resources that will allow you to digitize your collection for additional preservation and convenience... and I've placed them beneath this break!
Backing Up Media To A Hard Drive
MakeMKV: https://www.makemkv.com/
MakeMKV is the program I use for backing up blu-rays and DVD. It’s “free while in beta”, and as far as I can tell it’s going to continue to be in beta forever. You just need to register the program with the beta code, which can be found here: https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1053. If your registration ever expires, you can just go to that post and they’ll have it updated with a new one.
“MKV” is “Matroska Video”, which is a container format (named after the Russian nesting doll) that collects the video track, audio track(s), and subtitle track(s) all into one file, which is super convenient for anime, because that means you don’t need to worry about making separate files for different combinations of dubs and subs. My understanding is that this is, essentially, a lossless video copy, and I’ve done comparisons comparing screenshots taken from video playing off the disc and from the .mkv, and I haven’t been able to notice a difference. As for playing .mkv files…
Watching .mkv Files
VLC Media Player: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/
The Combined Community Codec Pack (CCCP): https://download.cnet.com/Combined-Community-Codec-Pack/3000-2139_4-10966585.html
mpv.net: https://github.com/mpvnet-player/mpv.net
VLC is my media player of choice for watching back the stuff I back up. I’m not 100% sure if you need to download the CCCP for this- my backups play fine on my tablet just using the VLC app, and I recently found out they even work off a USB stick plugged into a Samsung Smart TV- but it doesn’t hurt to have.
MakeMKV can also be directly integrated with VLC Media Player to play blu-rays right from the drive, which is tremendously valuable if you're not interest in/don't have the hard drive space for digitization. I think I’ve encountered maybe one thing that couldn’t be played off the disc with this solution, and that was fixed in a subsequent update to MakeMKV. The full breakdown of how to do that can be found here: https://stolafcarleton.teamdynamix.com/TDClient/1893/StOlaf/KB/ArticleDet?ID=128854.
Alternatively, if you're looking for a video player that requires a little bit more elbow grease to use efficiently but is more powerful, I would recommend mpv.net. mpv is a open-source media player that, like many great open-source projects, is meant to be run from the command line. mpv.net is mpv with a Graphical User Interface, which makes it considerably more user friendly.
Maintaining .mkv Files
MKVToolNix: https://mkvtoolnix.download/downloads.html
Different companies author discs differently, and I like to keep my stuff organized the same way, which is where this tool comes in. I won’t go into too much detail on this here, but if you ever need to split one large file into smaller files (for example, a disc has 9 episodes of a show to a single title/file, and you want to split them into individual episodes), edit or remove chapter information, or rename audio/subtitle tracks, this is the tool to do it. There's a lot to this, so I would suggest reading the official documentation, but I could also whip up a guide if people are interested.
Compressing .mkv Files
HandBrake: https://handbrake.fr/
The video encoder for shrinking those backups down to size- my favorite example was getting all 49 episodes of G Gundam down from almost 300gb off-the-discs to just under 50gb. This is also going to be heavily dependent on how powerful your computer is, because encoding takes up a lot of resources. On my computer, which is by no means top-of-the-line, I’d say on average it takes about 50 minutes to encode a 24 minute episode of anime, and that increases exponentially the longer the source material is.
I got the settings I use in HandBrake from this incredibly detailed breakdown of how video encoding works: https://kokomins.wordpress.com/2019/10/10/anime-encoding-guide-for-x265-and-why-to-never-use-flac/#tldr-summary-for-x265-encode-settings. There's a lot of information there, too, but it also provides generic settings to plug in to HandBrake if you don't care to manually adjust the settings for each project you're doing.
And that’s everything I use for my process! A lot of this was trial and error with other programs that cost money, performed worse, and were generally aggravating to use. It's a bit of elbow grease, but the reward is that once something is digitized, you have it forever, exactly the way you want it.
