Transferring home movie DVD's to back up hard drive

I think you're on the right track.

Starting with the math: 45 discs x 4.7GB each (common DVD disc capacity) = 211.5GB total storage required.

All of your vids will fit comfortably on a 500GB external drive.

Handbrake is a fine option for ripping your home vids from the DVDs and converting the files to mp4. The resulting files can be named and cataloged any way you like, just as you would with any other files. Those mp4 file can be stored and transferred onto any sort of storage medium you like and will be easily accessible to any Mac (or PC, if you use compatible storage).

I will say Handbrake has worked very will for me for many years on several Macs running 10.15 Catalina, and I believe the software continues to support the newest Macs. You'll want to check their website for compatibility info. There are other ripping options as well.

DebTL wrote:

That is so helpful! Thank you!

Will I be able to see the videos as they transfer so I can stop it when the videos stop so I'm not recording dead air?

You're welcome. 🙂

Ripping video from DVD is not a real time process. An hour of video may only take 15 minutes to rip. The computer doesn't have to read the digital video file at human speed and copy it in the fashion as if transferring analog video or audio from tape to tape. You won't be monitoring a picture as the data gets transferred.

But once the file is off the disc and in computer, you can copy and edit to your heart's content using any video editor you like. If you wish to break out individual holidays and life events you can do that.

It used to be possible – and probably still is – to use Disk Utility to create an .DMG (disk image file) containing an image of a home video DVD. You can then mount that image and play it like a DVD, or use it to burn more DVDs without having to wait for an authoring program like iDVD to transcode all of your source materials all over again.

Apple started hiding the DVD Player application in some obscure system folder, but it's probably still around.

DebTL wrote:

That is so helpful! Thank you!

Will I be able to see the videos as they transfer so I can stop it when the videos stop so I'm not recording dead air?

You won't be recording dead air. The conversion process only converts the actual video file(s). Blank space on the DVD disc will not be converted or saved.

Servant of Cats wrote:

Apple started hiding the DVD Player application in some obscure system folder, but it's probably still around.

The DVD Player.app still exists. In Monterey it's located in /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications and may still be in that location in later versions of macOS. The app starts automatically when you insert a DVD into an attached SuperDrive or other DVD drive.

Macs have not had built-in DVD drives for some years now, so it makes sense to me that Apple would have moved the DVD Player.app out of the /Applications folder but kept it somewhere else in the system. Even when SuperDrives were built in, most people just inserted a DVD and the DVD Player.app would automatically start up. I don't believe many people just 'ran' the DVD Player.app without having already inserted a DVD into the drive.