Best Way to Rip Movies to Hard Drive?
 

I have several DVD movies (U.S. format) to copy to my hard drive. Anybody have a recommendation as to the best way to do this which will also make them easy to play (without having to mess with playlists, e.g.)? Not sure if that last bit is possible...

Using linuxmint with cinnamon if that matters.

I've been using Handbrake to convert some of my DVDs to MP4s. It states that it's not a ripper, it just converts the DVD contents to a different format. If the film takes 2 hrs to watch, it'd probably take 2 hrs to convert.
You have to point it at the video folder on the DVD 'cos it doesn't find it automatically and it'll scan it for chapters, etc, you can also decide what sort of audio you want and, for some unknown reason, you'll have check the "no chapter " notification or it'll have the chapter No at the foot of the screen. :doh: No biggie though. You can easily add subtitles or other dubbed languages if they're available on the DVD.

It'd be interesting to know if you get it to work with US DVDs, I haven't looked but I don't remember seeing anything saying it wouldn't. :D

If you want to change video files between formats I'd recomend Transmagedon

Play Bonny! :hattip:

Handbrake is good, but I don't like that it no longer supports avi file types...

I also use AcidRip,... but it's a bit harder to learn to use (have to play with settings to get a good rip, manually define the DVD resolution, adjust target file size etc.). You need to rip as a 2 pass to get good rips. But AcidRip usually fails when trying to rip DVDs from Disney or Universal. Handbrake handles them better.

You can also use VLC to record a DVD playback to disk,... but it's slow, the file ends up huge... and needs to be transcoded down for a smaller file size.

I also like Handbrake, but typically use it to do conversions for iPad/phone, since it needs the .mp4 format, and that's (to me), the most painless way to get it.

I use mencoder. Took me some time to get things worked out to get results I liked, so take these things for what they're worth. :)

You have to use -aid (audio ID) or -alang (audio language), -sid(subtitle ID) or -slang (subtitle language), for example:
To see which ones are available:Once you figure out which language/subtitle (if any), you want, you can rip. If you don't want subtitles, you can specify an invalid number if '0' doesn't work. If there are 9 subtitle tracks, just specify '10' for the subtitle ID. To rip it:
Replace the "dvd://1", with whatever track the movie is. Play some of the track first, to see what's up...sometimes, track 1 is the movie, with some commentary over it, or just a preview. Play it with "mplayer dvd://1", to make sure. Replace the -sid and -aid as above.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that this is a 16:9 (widescreen) rip. If you play it on a 4:3 screen, it'll not display the edges. Leave off the -aspect flag and it defaults to 4:3.

Thus far, I have not had much luck with ripping DVDs - even those that are not encrypted with DVDCSS - under Linux. 99% of the rips I make are done under a friend's Windows 7 system using DVDShrink. That being said, I have heard good things about K9Copy and HandBrake from others with more patience than I.

It would probably be worth reading through (some of) the guides on Doom9.org. If you have any questions, you can post in the Doom9.org Forum and/or in this thread.

Good luck! :)

I think you have most of the common choices above pointed out quite well.

There are some dvd's that may need a commercial windows product installed under wine to get the few new dvd's that are stinkers.

There are some legal issues that we don't need to go into also, so don't say it.

Handbrake is better than I expected actually.
Any recommended settings, folks? I don't need super high quality, but well enough it's still "good enough" and not annoying to watch.

Thanks for all the information, everyone. Marking your posts helpful.

There are two other tools for linux worth looking at:
dvdbackup
vobcopy

The resulting vob files can be combined into one mpg file with:
cat ~/dvd/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_{1..5}.VOB > dvd.mpg

There are 2 scripts in the Debian repositories that can easily encode mpg to xvid or h264:
xvidenc (useage: xvidenc -2p -p ehq -> select file -> type path to mpg file and press enter to select default options)
or
h264enc


Regards,
Stefan

PS Neither dvdbackup or vobcopy work well with recent dvds. The only way I could compress dvds for my kids to view on an android tablet on long trips was to use WinXP on Virtualbox (use dvd pass-through option) with Slysoft AnyDVD (costs few $$ once, but ongoing updates). BTW AnyDVD works well with DVDShrink.

I watch ripped dvd's on a 40 inch plasma with default handbrake settings. They seem OK to me. Most are not that much different than the dvd. Some very high action might need to be tweaked or maybe ones with nature scenes might be increased but most movies are fine.

Bottom line for me:

HANDBRAKE