Note to mods: This is not asking for instruction on illegal copyright infringement.
A buddy of mine is trying to rip a DVD-video into 2-minute segments on the computer for a presentation. Again, this is not copyrighted material, and I doubt these instructions would be useful for someone who wanted to copy a movie. Some regular format like MPEG or AVI is needed. I’m really not sure how to go about doing this efficiently without spending 48 hours re-encoding and splicing. Anyone got any ideas?
Instructions for either PC or Mac are acceptable.
TMPGEnc DVD Author can do this (assuming the original source material isn’t copy protected).
You can then edit the original file into segments as long or short as you like. Either two minute chapters (you can tell the program to split the file into two minute segments automatically) or cut out everything from the original and make a bunch of two minute segments.
You’ll have to rip the DVD to it’s .vob files. Then you can simply change the .vob file extension to .mpg and edit them as you like in any decent video editor. You may not even have to do the file extension trick, it just depends on the editor you use.
Another choice is DVDx (homepage and free download). It’s a freeware program that rips from DVDx directly to AVI or MPEG or whatever you have a codec for. You can specify beginning and end times for the rip.
The only thing is that it’s not the easiest program to use… but it is free, so give it a try if you’d like.
BTW, I think .VOBs are MPEG2 video files? .MPG/.MPEG is normally reserved for MPEG1 files, so some editors may not be able to open the renamed .VOBs.
I’m sure there are some people who’ve been living under a rock.
UPDATE: I helped my computer-illiterate friend use the DVDxDV or what-its-called last night to rip the segments required. It worked great, and thanks for the suggestions.
I had problems with DVDx - for some pieces, the ripped footage had a sort of lurching choppy feel to it, no matter what I did.
For exactly the kind of thing the OP describes, I use a two-stage process; DVDShrink to extract an exact copy of the segment I want, which comes out in a .vob; then I use VirtualDubMPG to convert this to an AVI.