How can I record sounds off a DVD?

Factual Questions
1

Here goes:

I’m watching Beavis & Butthead on my laptop, and want to capture and save the opening guitar theme song. I’m running InterVideo WinDVD, and seem to remember it being able to capture screen shots (apprently not in this version though) and am hoping I can also capture some sounds and save 'em as .wav files.

Does A) anyone know if I can do this, or B) is there some freeware that’ll let me do this?

I’ve got lots of idle time on my hands this week, so methinks this will be the culmination of my week’s productivity. :smiley:

Tripler
Yeah, I plan on making it my “Windows Startup” music.

2

I’ll save you the effort of experimenting with Winvideo. It won’t do it. I can’t help you out on this because of the confussion on what is and isn’t fair use now a days, and the moderators won’t allow it, which is proper policy in this case.

3

With the DVD player paused in the background, do this:

-Double-click on the gray speaker icon in the system tray (lower right).
-Go to Options -> Properties.
-Select “Recording” and make sure the “Stereo Mix” checkbox is checked. Then click OK.
-Make sure the stereo mix volume is up enough and that it’s the selected recording source.
-Go to Start -> Run and type sndrec32
-Click record and resume DVD playback.

After it’s done recording, just save it as a WAV and from there you can convert it to any other sound format.

Normally, DVD fair use is tricky because it involves breaking CSS protection (illegal in this country). However, audio-only clips using the above method doesn’t do any of that so it should be ok.

4

Setting a sound recorder running while you are playing the DVD will usually work, but you need to understand that you’re converting the digital audio to analogue and back again, so there will be loss involved - it’s usually tolerable though.

The proper way to do it (assuming you have the legal right to do so) is to demultiplex the audio stream out of the VOB files on the DVD - not all DVDs are encrypted, so you might not even fall foul of the law there. Check out some of the tools linked/described at videohelp.com