Converting old home movie DVDs into a private streaming site

A relative sent me a few DVDs containing _really old_ home videos that were at one point saved to DVDs. The problem is, I don't own a DVD player, and neither do most people in 2026. These discs were just sitting in a box, slowly becoming unplayable, holding memories nobody could actually watch (which is a real shame). So I bought a cheap USB DVD drive on Amazon (~$25, an Amicool A11), and figured I'd rip the discs and put the videos somewhere my family could get to them. I'm a vibe coder at this point so I used Claude Code and put together a workflow to rip the discs and upload the videos to private streaming site my whole family can pull up on their phones. Here's how we did it. ## What you need On the software side, everything is free CLI tools installed through Homebrew: `ddrescue` for ripping, `ffmpeg` for video conversion, and `wrangler` for uploading to Cloudflare. Claude Code handled the commands — I mostly described what I wanted and swapped discs. ## Step one: make a safe copy of each disc The first thing Claude Code suggested was making a bit-perfect copy of each disc before doing anything else. That way even if a disc gets scratched later, we have an exact digital duplicate. The tool for this is `ddrescue` (not `dd`). The difference: if a disc has scratches or bad spots, `dd` just fails. `ddrescue` is smarter — it copies what it can, then goes back and retries the problem areas. ```bash brew install ddrescue ``` There were a couple of macOS-specific gotchas that Claude Code figured out along the way. The disc drive doesn't show up in `diskutil list` like a normal drive — you need `drutil status` to detect it. And ddrescue needs to be told the exact disc size, otherwise it thinks there's 9,223 petabytes of data to read (basically infinity). The size comes from the block count that `drutil` reports. We wrapped all of this into a script so I could just run `./rip.sh disc-01`, wait about 10 minutes, swap the disc, and repeat. Each disc produced a ~4.3 GB `.iso` file — a perfect clone that I can keep forever as an archive. ## Step two: convert to something playable Mount the ISO and you find a `VIDEO_TS` folder full of `.VOB` files. That's the old DVD-Video format — fine for DVD players, useless for phones and browsers. `ffmpeg` converts each clip to a modern H.264 MP4: ```bash ffmpeg -i VTS_01_1.VOB \ -c:v libx264 -crf 22 \ -c:a aac -b:a 128k \ -movflags +faststart \ clip-01.mp4 ``` I didn't know any of these flags — Claude Code picked the settings and explained why each one matters (the `-movflags +faststart` one moves metadata to the front of the file so browsers can stream it without downloading the whole thing first). My discs had 13 to 21 clips each. ## Step three: put it online You could upload these to YouTube (unlisted), Google Drive, or Dropbox and call it a day. But I liked the idea of having my own thing — files on storage I control, a simple site I can customize, no platform deciding to compress my videos or change their sharing features. Claude Code set up the hosting on Cloudflare, which turned out to be free for this use case: - **Cloudflare R2** stores the video files. It's object storage, like a hard drive in the cloud. You upload files with a CLI command and they just sit there. - **Cloudflare Pages** hosts a simple website — one HTML file with a grid of video thumbnails. - A small **Pages Function** connects the two, serving videos from R2 when you click play. The upload was just a loop running `wrangler r2 object put` for each clip. Claude Code handled the commands while I did other things. The one step I had to do manually in the Cloudflare dashboard was connecting the R2 bucket to the Pages site. Under the project's Settings > Bindings, I added an R2 binding so the site's code could actually read from the bucket. Took about 30 seconds but it's not something the CLI can do yet. To lock it down to family only, there's **Cloudflare Access** — you add email addresses of people who should have access, and everyone else gets a login screen. Also free for small groups. ## The gallery The site itself is a single HTML page. No React, no build step. Just a dark grid of thumbnails. Claude Code added a couple of nice touches: **Lightweight thumbnails** — instead of loading 47 video players on page load, each clip shows a tiny JPEG thumbnail (~5 KB) with a play button. Click it and the actual video loads. The page loads in under a second. **Hover preview** — move your mouse across any thumbnail and it scrubs through the video, YouTube-style. This is done with sprite sheets — one image per clip containing 20 frames tiled horizontally (~40 KB each). No video data loads until you actually click play. There's a small progress bar at the bottom of each thumbnail as you scrub so you can tell where you are in the clip. The video manifest is just a JavaScript object that maps disc names to clip counts. When I rip a new disc, I add one line and redeploy. ## What it costs Essentially nothing. Cloudflare R2 doesn't charge for bandwidth — when family streams a video, there's no per-GB fee. Storage is free up to 10 GB, and my 3-disc archive is about 8 GB of converted video. Even if I rip every disc in the box I'd be well under $1/month. For a family casually rewatching old home videos, this is basically a free setup. ## The rip script Here's the script Claude Code and I ended up with. It auto-detects the disc, figures out the size, and runs a two-pass rip: ```bash #!/usr/bin/env bash set -euo pipefail if [[ $# -lt 1 ]]; then echo "Usage: $0 <disc-label>" exit 1 fi LABEL="$1" RAW_DIR="$(dirname "$0")/raw" LOG_DIR="$(dirname "$0")/logs" DISC=$(drutil status 2>/dev/null | grep "Name:" | awk '{print $NF}') if [[ -z "$DISC" ]]; then echo "No disc detected. Insert a disc and try again." exit 1 fi BLOCKS=$(drutil status 2>/dev/null \ | grep "Space Used:" \ | sed 's/.*blocks:[[:space:]]*//' \ | awk '{print $1}') DISC_SIZE=$(( BLOCKS * 2048 )) diskutil unmountDisk "$DISC" 2>/dev/null || true ddrescue -b 2048 -s "$DISC_SIZE" -n "$DISC" "$RAW_DIR/${LABEL}.iso" "$LOG_DIR/${LABEL}.log" ddrescue -b 2048 -s "$DISC_SIZE" -r 3 "$DISC" "$RAW_DIR/${LABEL}.iso" "$LOG_DIR/${LABEL}.log" echo "Done! $(ls -lh "$RAW_DIR/${LABEL}.iso" | awk '{print $5}')" ``` Pop a disc in, run `./rip.sh disc-04`, swap, repeat. About 10 minutes per disc. --- The whole project took about an hour of actual thinking work, and a few hours of waiting for discs to rip and videos to upload while I did other things. Claude Code handled the parts I didn't know — the ffmpeg flags, the Cloudflare Pages Function for video seeking, the sprite sheet math — and I handled the part it couldn't: physically swapping discs. My mom can now watch her old home videos on her phone. That alone was worth it. And I can rest easy knowing these family memories are safely stored in the cloud.