I've spent the last few mornings trying to figure out how to convert a DVD into an mp4 (for private use only).

It took me a while. Much longer than I expected. Here is the flow:

1) I ended up using MakeMKV to extract an .mkv file from the DVD.

2) Create an mp3 file from the main English audio track.

3) Create an mp4 file for the main title video.

4) Merge the mp3 with the mp4 into a new mp4 file.

This was the process I ended up with after exploring with several different methods that resulted in either very poor video quality, the wrong audio track, or no audio track at all.

Along the way I iterated on an interactive CLI prompt that allows me to generate a quick 5min sample video clip to test the video and audio before I run the full video conversion (which takes about 10min). I made the mistake of running the 10min task multiple times only to find myself watching a video with no audio.

My next step is to build the UI to CRUD video clips from these mp4 video files.

It was fun to learn about .mkv files (Matroska Video). They're a multimedia file type that store video, audio, subtitle tracks, and metadata.