Creating an ISO of a DVD in Linux Ubuntu and mounting it as a drive

I'm going to create an ISO of a DVD and mount the .iso file so it appears as a DVD drive, I'll be doing this in Linux Ubuntu 10.

There's many reasons why you might want to do this, I've got some DVD's that I don't want to lose and by this time we've all reaslised that CD's and DVD's are almost as unreliable as floppy disks were.. that ever dreaded sound of the drive choking on your favourite movie.. lost forever, or having to wait for it to arrive from Amazon

We're going to create the ISO with Brasero which comes with Ubuntu, if it's not installed (Applications -> Sound & Video -> Brasero Disc Burner) then just apt-get it:

sudo apt-get install brasero

With brasero it's easy to either copy a CD/DVD or create an ISO of it however it didn't work for me out of the box due to a missing library:

Please install the following manually and try again:
libdvdcss.so.2 (library).

To fix this we need to add the medibuntu repository:

sudo wget --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list && sudo apt-get --quiet update && sudo apt-get --yes --quiet --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get --quiet update

The medibuntu is a very useful repository that contains packages excluded from the main ubuntu repository's for legal reasons.

Then we're able to install the missing library we need:

sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2

Open up brasero and select "Disk Copy" under "Create a new Project" on the left, the "Copy CD/DVD" dialog will appear, select "Image File" from the "Select a disc to write to" drop down menu, click the "Properties" button to change the output file location and click "Create Image".

Depending on the size of the CD/DVD it may take some time to create the image.

Once it's complete you can mount the ISO of the DVD, remove the DVD from the drive and watch it direct from the hard drive.. it also improves speed when converting a DVD to a compressed video format which I'll cover in the next post, for now let's mount the iso as a drive.

To do this we mount the ISO as a loop device, but first we must create a directory to mount it to:

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/iso

 Then mount it:

sudo mount -o loop mydvd.iso /mnt/iso

The "Open DVD from folder" option in SMPlayer works perfectly and of course you can now burn this ISO to a blank DVD using Brasero.