Cognitive Interregnum here. Long-time reader, first-time poster, it’s a pleasure to speak to you all.
A question regarding DVD ripping, if I may. I’ve already wandered through the search engine but most threads I found might be a bit outdated so I hope you’ll forgive me for reasking it here.
I’ve built up a sizeable collection of DVDs and will be heading to the U.K. later this year for study. As I’ve bought these DVDs Down Under, it’ll be impractical to take them and even if I did, they’re the wrong region code. Can anyone please recommend me some good, reliable, ripping software?
I have already tired Format Factory but it’s struggled with a large proportion of my DVDs so I’d like something a bit better.
Addendum:
I am conscious of the legal situation with this. My understanding is that it’s illegal to own the ripping software but not the ripped material in the U.S., it’s legal to have both in Australia and New Zealand, and it’s a grey area in the U.K. I’m not really after legal opinions, but if you feel you must, then by all means let me know.
The best software I’ve found is DVDshrink. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to find the last version 3.2; what you’ll likely find with google are malware impersonating it. (DVDshrink32setup.zip 1069KB from 2005) It will produce 4.3GB ISO files from a DVD.
Another option is DVDfab Decrypter; they have a free version that will simply do a decrypt/rip files to disk, but won’t do the crunch to 4.5GB (single layer DVD) unless you buy it. Uncompressed, a DVD could take 7 to 9GB. They do take off the protection, but AFAIK won’t do conversion between PAL and NTSC - so it’s good that you don’t need that.
DVDfab often does copy protection removal that much older DVDshrink can’t handle, after which I can use DVDshrink’s “open files” instead of “open disc” to create an ISO from the decrypted files. If the DVD has a new copy protection scheme, odds are DVDfab will have an update to handle it almost as soon.
(9GB per uncompressed disk, a 1TB hard disk can hold about 111 discs. You’ll need a decent number of hard disks and a good lead time, and the patience to babysit each of those ripping processes. Good luck!
Personally I use DVD Decrypter - Wikipedia It produces a similar set of files to the original DVD, the videos are in VOB files. It’s good because you can choose to split by chapter or other selections. Then you can just delete sections you don’t want.
Another solution is Handbrake.
If you’re using a Mac, you can just make an image of the DVD and mount it. This method is legal, because it doesn’t defeat copyright protection. I think you first have to decide:
What format you want to rip to (mp4, vob, mov etc.)
How much space you want to use per DVD (less space = more work)
If you want subtitles and extras
My understanding is that ripping software is not itself illegal anywhere, and that decryption software is not itself illegal in the U.S. The illegal part is just using them together. (As far as I know, using decryption is illegal except to be able to actually watch the disk.)
You can use the cq mode if you want to keep a constant quality, or if you like to keep each flick under a certain size, a two pass targeted filesize will get you there.
If you really want to dig into the depths of video encoding, you can find a wealth of knowledge at doom9
There are free methods like listed above, but the decryption isnt always up to date. I love DVDShrink (free), however you need a burning utility to go along with it (as well as a decryption program).
This is good advice. The only part I would change is that DVDFab Decrypter does give you all or most of the features for 30 days, then downgrades to no compression after that time. You can burn onto dual layer DVDs without compression, but they are several times more expensive.
You biggest problem will be region conversion. DVD Shrink says it can make them all regions, YMMV. You have to covert from PAL R4 to PAL R2. I tried to convert from PAL R2 to NTSC R1 and had no luck with that combo or several other programs.
As both involve PAL DVDs, might it be easier and less work to buy a region free DVD player, or see if your current one can be converted?
My own advice, mirroring quite a bit of the advice above, would be:
Rip using DVDFab Decrypter, which will give you a DVD folder (VIDEO_TS)
Encode to H264 MKV files using Handbrake.
Delete the DVD folder
Both pieces of software are free, and you can get very nice quality MKV files that are a fraction of the size of full DVD folders.
One warning, though: the ripping doesn’t take too long, but encoding can be quite a slow process if you don’t have a reasonably fast processor. My Intel Q8300 quad-core machine takes about an hour, give or take a bit, to encode a movie at decent settings. If you have a blazing fast i-5 or i-7 processor, you can probably beat that comfortably, but if you have an older Core 2 Duo or Dual Core system, it could be considerably slower.
I’ve been ripping my Blu-Ray/DVD’s using a combination of DVDFab to rip the raw blu-ray/DVD format files form the disc (minus encryption), then using handbrake to transcode to a .mkv file at a constant quality.
.mkv through h.264 nets me a copy that is close enough to the original for me at a fraction of the size, and allows me to add various audio tracks (I usually include a pass through of the high quality HD sound, a Dolby II version of that, and then any commentary tracks) and subtitles.
