Ripping a DVD

The process of ripping a DVD is the process of taking the video and sound off the DVD with the purpose of storing it somewhere else for later playback. There are two things that you can do if you wish to rip a DVD, either store the DVD on your computer's hard drive for later playback on the computer or copy the DVD to a DVD-R or DVD+R.

Note: this guide and process primarily aids in the circumvention of region coding restrictions and does not advocate the breach of Copyright to create infringing copies.

Some DVD videos produced since 2005 incorporate malformed VTS structures to prevent programs such as DVDdecrypter from correctly skipping bad sectors.

To circumvent this TPM, please use DVD Fab. Decrypter

Utility of choice: DVD Fab. Decrypter

1. Place the DVD movie into your DVD-ROM drive in preference to your DVD burner because:
   • It stops the laser in your burner (which requires more precision than a reading laser) from getting dirty - the sure-fire fastest way to brick your burner!
2. Load DVD Fab. Decrypter.
3. Select 'Full Disc' from the left-hand menu.
4. Select the correct 'Source' DVD drive from the drop-down box at the top.
5. Browse and select the 'Target' destination directory underneath the Source at the top - click on the browse button (the button with the image of a folder as its icon).
6. Click the 'Start' button at the bottom right.

Utilities of choice: DVD Shrink 3.2.0.15 and ImgBurn

1. Place the DVD movie into your DVD-ROM drive in preference to your DVD burner for two important reasons:
   • It stops the laser in your burner (which requires more precision than a reading laser) from getting dirty.
   • You don't have to swap disks halfway through the process.
2. Load DVD Shrink.
3. Select 'Open Disc'.
4. Select the drive containing the DVD movie and click 'OK'.
5. Wait until the Analysis finishes. If it encounters a read error use DVD Fab. Decrypter to rip instead (refer above).
6. Under DVD Structure, select 'Main Movie'.
7. On the right-hand side column (Compression Settings) check the Video percentage.
8. If the percentage is less than 80% then consider removing redundant audio streams.
9. To remove audio streams uncheck them under the 'Audio' section.
10. If the Video percentage is still under 80% then click on 'Extras' under DVD structure.
11. On the right-hand side column (Compression Settings) select the drop down box (filled as 'Automatic').
12. Change the Video drop down box from 'Automatic' to 'Custom ratio'.
13. Drag the slide bar across left until the percentage is about 50%.
14. Under DVD Structure, re-select 'Main Movie'.
15. If the Video percentage is still under 80% then click on 'Menus' under DVD structure.
16. On the right-hand side column (Compression Settings) select the drop down box (filled as 'Automatic').
17. Drag the slide bar across left until the percentage is about 50%.
18. If the Video percentage is under 70% by this stage then click on 'Re-author' and select the main movie and drag it over to the left column (see Re-Authoring below).
19. Finally select 'Backup!'.
20. Under the 'Quality Settings' tab make sure that both check-boxes are selected.
21. Under the 'Target Device' tab select 'ISO Image File and burn with ImgBurn' as the backup target.
22. Click 'OK'.
23. If you are sensible and did as suggested (put the Movie in the DVD-ROM drive) then you can come back in a hour to collect your duplicate. Otherwise you will have to return in 45 minutes to switch the movie over for a blank disc!

1. Drag only the main movie (usually the largest title) across from the right-hand window to the left-hand window.
2. The compression setting should be set to Automatic (so change this if it is not).
3. The movie should now fit onto a single DVD-5.
4. If you are copying a DVD full of TV series episodes then you can drag across multiple titles (e.g. half the ones on the original disc), but ideally you should be using a $2-$3 dual-layer disc for these

If you encounter the problem where a DVD will not shrink sufficiently to fit the film onto a single-layer DVD, an easy, but not necessarily quick, fix is to encode it to the automatic settings and save it as an ISO. Then reopen the ISO with DVD Shrink and recompress it.

* Note - make sure that you have observed step 18 before doing this :-p

Utilities of choice: DVD Decrypter and VirtualDub Mod with Xvid codec.

1. Place the DVD movie into your DVD-ROM drive (in preference to your DVD burner for two important reasons).
2. Load DVD Decrypter.
3. Select 'Mode>IFO'.
4. Select the sequence in the input tab you would like to rip (and ultimately convert to xvid.) Tip, Observe the stream length to find the main titles on the disc.
5. Open stream processing Tab - enable stream processing and choose the Demux option for ALL streams..
6. Make sure you have the video AND ac3 files selected also (if more than one exists select the preferred one ie, 5.1ch).
7. then press the DVD>HDD button and wait until streams have been ripped. After this action you will be left with a few files in the output directory, all we require of these are the mv2 file and the ac3 file.
8. Now fire up virtual dub Mod and load the mv2 file,
9. in virtual dubs video options choose full processing mode and select the xvid codec, I use L5 as a default setting for a good quality/size balance.
10. open up streams and add the ac3 stream to the video.
11. then chose to save as avi, this step will take quite some time depending on system speed, and is best batched to do a few files after one another over night. The resulting file will be one with comparable video quality as the original, no loss in audio quality/channels and about 1/4 the size!

Another way to convert DVD movies to xvid/divx is to use DVD Decrypter together with Auto Gordian Knot. It lets the user specify the output size and will automatically configure the codec. It also reads IFO files, so there is no need to demux the streams.

1. Start DVD Decrypter
2. Select Mode → IFO
3. Under the Input tab of the main screen, select the stream you wish to convert to divx/xvid
4. Under the Stream Processing tab of the main screen, select ”Enable Stream Processing” and tick the streams you wish to include, like video, audio and subtitles.
5. Press the big DVD → HDD button on the left and wait for it to finish copying everything over to the harddrive.
6. Open AutoGK and open the .IFO file that you have created
7. Select the audio-stream(s) and subtitle stream(s) you want to include
8. Select the desired size of the output
9. Press the “Add job” button and if you want to do more than one disk or episode, return to step 6.
10. When you've added all the programmes, press Start.
11. Wait…
12. The size should be pretty much spot on to what you selected and the quality should be very good.

To do the above using Linux, there is a ripper/encoder package similar to AGK called Thoggen. In Ubuntu 8.04 you can install it using “sudo apt-get install thoggen”. Because Ubuntu can't package the CSS2 decoding keys, you have to get them from elsewhere. In Ubuntu, add “deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ hardy free non-free” to the bottom of your /etc/apt/sources.list. Before you run apt-get update, download and add the gpg keys “wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -” then do “sudo apt-get update” followed by “sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2”.

You can now run thoggen and encode DVDs to ogg-video of a pre-determined size.