Hey, Dopers, I’m having trouble finding the answers to these questions elsewhere and feel pretty certain I can get the answers I’m looking for here. I tried searching for an old SDMB thread on this subject, but didn’t have any luck.
Basically, I want to get rid of my DVD collection in order to downsize my life a little bit, but I want to copy all of them onto my hard drive first. I’m looking for the software that will allow me to do the following things:
Remove any and all DRM restrictions… if it can’t copy/rip every DVD I own I’m not interested
Make a copy of the full DVD onto my hard drive (with the “AUDIO_TS” and “VIDEO_TS” folders within the folder for the DVD itself)
Have the ability to burn a movie onto a DVD-R to play in a DVD player when necessary (it’ll be nice to get rid of all our Baby Einstein DVDs and cases, but eventually BomTek Jr is going to want to watch one of them again… if I can just make him a disc he can pop into the DVD player, everyone’s happy)
Turn any of my DVDs into an iPod-compatible format later… I’m deploying to Afghanistan in a few months and I want to be able to load up my iPod without having to track down a DVD-R, burn it, then put it right back in my DVD drive in order to do the rip
From what I can tell, I think I can use DVDfab to copy and rip my DVDs and ImgBurn to make a physical disc later, but I’m not sure DVDfab can do the after-the-face iPod conversion. There also might be a freeware or open-source option for that that I don’t know about.
I think I worded everything OK, but if you think you can help me out (and believe me, I appreciate any help I can get here) but you’re not sure exactly what it is that I’m wanting to do, let me know.
I don’t think it can convert your videos to play on an ipod. You’ll need a video conversion program to do that. First get the movie files on your computer, then convert them to a format that will play on you ipod (mp4 I believe) and then add them to the ipod.
I hope someone will come along and recommend a good video conversion program.
What you want is DVD Decrypter. It’s not legal everywhere so I won’t provide a link. But you can Google it.
What this will do is pull all the files off of a DVD and put it in a folder, where you can make an avi or mkv file or any other type of file.
Now once you take the files off the DVD you can use a number of programs. I strongly recommend Handbrake.
I can notice the difference when I encode my DVDs so I can use them on a computer. It’s by far the best free program. It has a bit of a learning scale, but I’ve never had such excellent and quality encodes.
You can Google around for settings for Handbrake or just ask me here if you can’t figure it out and I can give you the ones I use. Handbrake has preset for iPod
I can’t recommend handbrake enough for encoding. Also use MKV as a container and use h.264 to encode. MKV is the latest container. You can use avi as a container but it’s getting a bit long in the tooth.
Another good tool to read what others have used to encode their video is Media Info
I use slysoft’s AnyDVD - but you will need another version for HD and bluray disks.
That gives you all of the files you would find on the original disk. To get an avi or other file, you need a dvd ripping program. I like the one from Xilisoft.
Both are commercial products so you will have to shell out a few bucks. There are freeware programs too but in my opinion, they have a steeper learning curve and don’t always work as well. Both products I’ve named have regular updates to keep up with changes in dvd publishing and I think both are very easy and intuitive to use.
I’ve actually done this with Dvdshrink 3.2. I have a lot of VHS and Hi8 stuff I converted to DVD and then saved as ISO files. I would mount the ISO files as virtual DVDs and then start Dvdshrink and click on Reauthor tabs and select the DVDs I was interested in and drag the segments I wanted to the image I was making and then either burn it or make a new ISO.
The plus side is that this is fast and easy, and the video isn’t re-rendered unless it won’t fit on the DVD, so there is no degradation. The downside is that there is no menu, so it is a pain to go to a particular segment. I even lose the skip ahead 10 minutes I had when I originally captured it.
Wait, do you even need MacDVDRipperPro? Because I’ve ripped DVDs on my Mac and I thought I only put HandBrake on it. (Perhaps I put another program there as well, but if I did so, it was free.)
What would happen if you had DVDs from different regions? I have both North American and UK DVDs and wanted to do the same thing. Would these programs (MAC) eliminate the region coding somewhere in the process?