What to do with ISOs?

I just got into usenet and some of the files downloaded are ISOs. I’m trying to figure out the best way to convert them to mp4s so that I can play them through plex. I’m running on a headless arch server (Manjaro), and I’d prefer to keep the conversion there if possible.

Anyone have experience with this?

60 comments

I was so confused because all my isos are of operating systems

62
- I know you're joking, but actually most ISOs I have are actually operating systems or games. I've never seen a normal movie release as an ISO, except maybe 1:1 copies of retail disks.
  
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  Radarr seems to love finding blu-ray quality movies as ISOs
  
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  If they are backups, rather name them .img.
  
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Handbrake reads and converts DVD movie and video ISOs. If they are encrypted, MakMKV and DVDDecrypter can be used to get them ready for Handbrake.

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- I've tried HandBrakeCLI and for some reason it detects all tracks as 5 seconds and outputs a 2.4mb file from a 29gb ISO. Does this mean they're encrypted?
  
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  If it's a 29GB ISO it's definitely not a DVD but likely a BluRay. It may be encrypted/corrupted/not a video. Try MakeMKV next to see if it can decrypt and recognize the chapters.
  
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- I think this is the best response for OP!
  
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Mount that shit

8
- Always mount unknown ISO files you download off music websites.
  
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Handbrake is able to "mount" ISOs, should be pretty straightforward from there.

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- I've tried HandBrakeCLI and for some reason it detects all tracks as 5 seconds and outputs a 2.4mb file from a 29gb ISO
  
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@Cqrd You are looking for https://www.makemkv.com

7
If there is no encryption involved, you should be able to unpack them with 7zip without any mounting and then convert with ffmpeg to a format of your liking. IIRC, DVDs usually consist of a bunch of VOB files. You can just cat them all together and then send directly to ffmpeg.

6
- Cating them together does only work in some cases though.
  
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  Could you elaborate?
  
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Can you mount them? If so what does that look like?

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- If you are in windows, right click on the iso and the option to mount the image should come up. Once mounted it should look like a DVD or CD was inserted and should behave as such.
  
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  Manjaro
  
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ISOs are disc images. You’d have to mount them with something like Daemon Tools. To be honest, it’s been awhile since I pirated anything but movies, so there’s probably a better way to do it now. ISOs are also what we use in emulation when the console in question used discs, so I have a bunch of ISOs of discs I backed up to use in emu.

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I've always used Free ver. of PowerISO to "mount" the disc image to a virtual drive like others mentioned. Anyone who's emulated PlayStation 1/2 games would be very familiar with this format. Otherwise any old software released on CD format you'll probably find as an ISO.

4
Use ffmpeg to convert them

4
Is usenet worth it?

4
- My god yes. The download speeds are so fast and I have never had issues with quality while using it. No more waiting 3 weeks to download a movie with 1 seeder.
  
  If you have any questions, I can answer to the best of my ability.
  
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  How much is it? And do you use a VPN while connecting to it? Is it like a private torrent tracker?
  
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- It seems pretty nice so far. I was in a few private trackers for movies and TV and they were fine but I stopped using them when my VPN apparently failed me and I got called out by my ISP, so I’m really digging not having to worry about seeding. Also, some private trackers have a weird amount of drama and it’s kind of off-putting.
  
  I still use MAM though, it’s by far the best tracker around and I love the community and books it provides.
  
  Any, part of the improvements I’m seeing I think is just because I’m finally using radarr and sonarr, I think you can technically use these with torrents too, so this quality of life improvement could probably have been achieved without Usenet. But not having to worry about seeding is very nice.
  
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I would imagine if they are ISOs a DVD converter would probably work.

3
I’d like to recommend using DVDFab for converting your ISO files to MP4 format. It's available on Linux, including your Manjaro setup. If you encounter any issues with encrypted DVDs, you might also need to consider tools like MakeMKV for decryption. Just keep in mind that MakeMKV is typically used to extract the video without compression, so you can then use DVDFab HD Decrypter afterward to convert to MP4 if needed.

2
Assuming the .iso file is a DVD/Bluray image: Open the file in MakeMKV. Select the tracks you want, and it will…make a MKV file out of it. That should be fine for Plex.

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- I'm doing this through a terminal, no GUI tools
  
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  Permanently Deleted
  
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  eac3to to demux video and audio, mkvtoolnix or mkvmerge to remux to mkv. edit: You need to extract the dirs from the iso first though, you can use something like 7-zip for that though.
  
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@Cqrd i use wincdemu to mount and 7zip to unzip contents without mounting on windows boxes, same for Linux but wincdemu is cdemu, fuseiso, acetoneiso or brasero

https://sourceforge.net/projects/fuseiso/files/
https://cdemu.sourceforge.io/about/
https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Brasero/Documentation
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acetoneiso

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I’d like to recommend you some freeware like handbrake and makemkv. But if you DVDs are copy protected, you’ll need to try some other free tools like Free DVD Decrypter and dvdfab hd decrypter.

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Handbrake can convert DVD images into other formats if that's what you have. (7ish gigs each)

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- I've tried HandBrake and for some reason it detects all tracks as 5 seconds and outputs a 2.4mb file from a 29gb ISO
  
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  Try messing around with feature selection, or try with "--main-feature".
  
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Mount them and move stuff over.

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mkdir /mnt/iso
sudo mount -o loop /path_to_iso/filename.iso /mnt/iso

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