Help me move my DVDs to a hard drive.

Factual Questions
1

So now that I can get a 500GB external HDD for $140 I’m thinking of ripping my DVDs on to it and using an older PC as a media center PC and hook it up via DVI to my HDTV. Basically I want to put my movies on there just as I have my 250+ CDs. I want to be able to select a movie from my HDD and just play it like an MP3 without hassle.

I’ve been farting around with different ripping/decoding programs to try to get a good, but compressed, rip and can’t find anything that gives me a DVD, or near DVD quality rip or at least broadcast TV quality at 1GB or less HDD space. I don’t want menus and extra features. I don’t need max resolution or HD picture. Just the raw movie.

I’ve been trying with my main PC and don’t want to invest in the HDD until I know this is something I can do and get an acceptable, but relatively compressed picture.
Are there programs out there that can do this?
Can anyone give me some good rip settings to use with any generic program? ie bit rate, file size, FPS audio rate etc…

This is NOT about making copies of movies to put on DVDs or whatever. This is about taking MY movies and centralizing them on MY HDD at a reduced, but acceptable, quality.

Thoughts?

2

Technically, it is illegal to do so because you would be bypassing commercial DVD encryption. From here:

That being said, a resourceful person could find some software that would enable him to copy DVDs if they were so inclined. However, getting a movie down to 1gb will significantly alter the clarity, etc. It might be viewable on a smaller computer monitor, but you aren’t gonna have DVD quality.

3

I can help you. While it is against the law it at the same time is not. While you will bypass the encryption your DVD player does the same thing just to play them. Once a mod comes by and gives me the A-Ok i will help you.

4

Just so you know, a good quality rip will run you about 350 Megabytes for about 43 minutes of video. That would be good enough for most video watching, however if you get a really big screen, you might need to make it bigger.

5

I dont know what kind of rip you guys are talking about but the ones i do are great quality. I usually rib at ~2 gigs though, because i can afford the space and i want quality. The Depends on the codec that is used

6

That’s not true. It doesn’t even make sense.

That’s not true; either. The manufacturers license the right to decode the DVD from the copyright holder proxies. They’re not bypassing the encryption, they’re decrypting it: which they’re allowed to do (they licensed it), and you’re not (you didn’t). (Also note that the DVD player isn’t making a copy, although that’s a side issue to the DMCA’s limitation on decrypting WITHOUT THE ENCRYPTOR’S CONSENT.)

7

It boils down to:

  1. You are allowed, by law, to make PERSONAL backup copies of legally purchased media, or to change the medium of that media (VHS to DVD for example).

  2. Paradoxically, you are not allowed to do #1 if it involves defeating encryption, which almost all video media employs.

Morally speaking, you should have no qualms whatever in breaking #2 if you are strictly sticking to the rules for #1. However it’s still against the law. Contact your congress critter, etc.

Now essentially, copying a DVD to your hardrive involves two steps: The decryption of said DVD and localization of the video files (copying them to your hard-drive), and re-encoding the video.

The first part is easily done with software (both legal and not so legal - google is your friend).

I won’t discuss that aspect of it since it’s against board rules.

Part two is where quality and size are determined. Now you can have a 1:1 copy of the DVD simply by using your ripped Vob files, menus and all. However, that will take up a considerable amount of space, and are you really going to listen to the director’s commentary more than once? And even if you are, you can always go back to the DVD (which you still own, right?!) for those special occasions. So instead you’ll rip just the main feature.

You have lots of options here but three main ones are WMV, Divx, or Xvid. High quality WMV can take a looong time to encode, but it’s natively supported by windows and the XBOX360 (which can be used as a media extender). Divx and Xvid are both much quicker at encoding, and it seems most people think Xvid produces better quality video. I’m not so sure about that, but I’d give each of these codecs a try and see which gives you the better results.

Programs I’d recommend for encoding: Nero 7, TMPeg Xpress (I use this), Virtual Dub (free).

What you want to do is maximize video quality and minimize size. The best way to do this is to encode at a variable bit rate and do several passes. It becomes a trial error exercise at this point. Try different bit rates, make sure you look for artifacts in fast moving scenes and output video at several different settings so you can look at them side by side.

I can typically squeeze a 2 hour movie into around a gig of space at a quality level that I can’t distinguish from DVD, a tleast not on my 34" HDTV.

8

Good grief. I didn’t think this would turn into a debate of the legalities here so let me ask the question a different way.

How do I take a 2 hour, DVD quality video/audio file and rip/compress it to around 1GB without menus or any other silly stuff. I don’t care about decryption or breaking copy protection. There is plenty about that elsewhere on the web if I so desire. I’m just looking for some good settings for a standard video compression program to do what I stated above. That’s all.

I’m not looking for DVD quality, but I would like at least broadcast quality.

Thanks for the answers provided all ready.

9

To do what you are talking about you must decrypt the data on most commercial DVDs sold in the US. So you do care about decryption.

10

Cite?

11

In every discussion I bring this up someone always asks for a cite. Is it really not that well known that what I describe falls under Fair Use?

I’ll have to dig up a cite after work. But I’m 100% certain of this.

12

OK assuming you have a legal unencrypted DVD you want to back up then some of the software in the links below will allow you to burn it to and avi format, which is probably what you want. I am not going to recommend a package as
(i) not every package works well with every type of movie. Some get very confused with variable bit rate audio tracks and lose synch. Some dvds have settings designed to trip up variuos converters (only the commercial encrypted ones though). Some are good but very slow, some are good but a bit complicated.
(ii) not every package will work with every computer. Some lack the right codecs and expect you to have them already.

I will say some of the worst I have tried have been the commercial ones though. In general you shouldnt have to pay money. But you wll have to try several to find one that suits. Read the reviewers comments - they will help you to avoid the real duds

http://www.digital-digest.com/software/category-35.html

13

oh and many of the above do not have the software to break the encryption. That is a separate issue which is probably too much of a grey area for this board.