HowToRipADVD

Adapted from the article:
How to rip a DVD: A Tutorial
by Elliott Back
Posted in Computers & Technology, Movies, Law, P2P on December 26th, 2005. (source )

Ripping a DVD to xvid or divx avi is really quite easy, if you have the right tools. You’ll first need to download DVD decrypter and AutoGK (auto gordian knot). DVD decrypter allows you to rip the raw DVD video and audio data off of your disk drive, decrypt the CSS protection, and finally remove any other protection schemes, such as Macrovision. AutoGK is a package of codecs and a GUI interface that will take the raw DVD data through an AV processing pipeline to produce a single windows video file.

Step 1: RIP

Put in a DVD and launch DVD Decrypter. From the Mode menu, make sure IFO is checked. From the Tools—Settings menu, in the IFO Mode tab, set File splitting to None.

Now go back to the main window and select a destination for your files.

You need to choose which program chain (PGC) to rip. There will be many PGCs on the disc (featurettes, clips for the dvd menus, and other cruft). For a movie you usually want to pick the longest one, or in the case of a TV dvd you’ll see several clips of similar length and you should choose the appropriate episode. (Each episode needs to be ripped separately and put in its own folder.)

Once everything’s set up. Click the green arrow and wait about 10 minues for it to rip, after which time you will have a set of files which look like this:

VTS_01_0.IFO
VTS_01_PGC_07 – Stream Information.txt
VTS_01_PGC_07_1.VOB

If you didn’t set “File Splitting” to “None”, and if the video that you’re ripping is bigger than 1GB in size, you may see several VOB files. This is because by default DVD Decrypter breaks large movies into 1GB chunks.

Step 2: ENCODE

Launch AutoGK and select the VOB that you just ripped as an input file. (If the film was split into several 1GB chunks, just pick the first chunk and it will join them automatically.) Set a location for the output AVI.

Now you need to select which audio track (or tracks) to include. Choose Audio Stream 0 for the primary audio.

• If there are other audio tracks available in the VOB, you will have the option of choosing a second audio track to go into the resulting AVI. There may be one or more versions of the film dubbed into Spanish, French, etc, or there may be a Dolby 5.1 version of the audio track, or there might be filmmaker’s commentary. Compared to video, audio does not take very much space at all when encoded, so it won’t make a big difference in size if you want to include a second audio track (for example, i usually include the commentary, because i’m a geek). You just need to figure out what the different audio tracks actually contain. For that you should play the VOB file and try out the different channels. (Your AVI/VOB player should have the ability to choose between mutliple audio tracks. If it doesn’t, i recommend downloading VLC Media Player.)

Choose an Output Size. You can choose either a fixed size for the AVI output, or a fixed quality level.

• I usually do a fixed size of 200MB on a 25-minute episode or 500MB on a full-length film. This will typically produce a quality level of around 55%, which is good enough for my TV.
• If you plan on playing it on computer display at high resolution, and you’re really bothered by the compression artifacts, try setting a quality level of 70%.

Click on Advanced Settings and choose: Output resolution setting – “Maximum width”; Output audio type – “VBR MP3 256 kbs”.

Then click add job and start.
After a couple hours, you’ll have a log that looks like the following:

[12/26/2005 9:07:27 AM] AutoGK 2.26
[12/26/2005 9:07:27 AM] OS: WinXP (5.1.2600).2
[12/26/2005 9:07:27 AM] Job started.
[12/26/2005 9:07:27 AM] Input file: J:\VIDEO_TS\VTS_01_0.IFO
[12/26/2005 9:07:27 AM] Output file: J:\Output.avi
[12/26/2005 9:07:27 AM] Output codec: XviD
[12/26/2005 9:07:27 AM] Audio 1: Unknown language AC3 2ch
[12/26/2005 9:07:27 AM] Subtitles: none
[12/26/2005 9:07:27 AM] Format: .AVI
[12/26/2005 9:07:27 AM] Target size: 350Mb
[12/26/2005 9:07:27 AM] Custom audio settings: VBR MP3 with average bitrate: 128Kbps
[12/26/2005 9:07:27 AM] Started encoding.
[12/26/2005 9:07:27 AM] Demuxing and indexing.
[12/26/2005 9:08:30 AM] Processing file: J:\VIDEO_TS\VTS_01_PGC_04_1.VOB
[12/26/2005 9:08:30 AM] Source resolution: 720×480
[12/26/2005 9:08:30 AM] Found NTSC source.
[12/26/2005 9:08:30 AM] Source aspect ratio: 4:3
[12/26/2005 9:08:30 AM] Analyzing source.
[12/26/2005 10:28:40 AM] Source is considered to be hybrid (mostly NTSC).
[12/26/2005 10:28:40 AM] Looking for optimal hybrid thresholds.
[12/26/2005 10:28:45 AM] Found threshold of: 1.38
[12/26/2005 10:28:45 AM] Output will contain 38690 frames
[12/26/2005 10:28:45 AM] Decoding audio.
[12/26/2005 10:29:16 AM] Normalizing audio.
[12/26/2005 10:29:28 AM] Encoding audio.
[12/26/2005 10:31:57 AM] Audio1 size: 17,708,400 bytes (16.89 Mb)
[12/26/2005 10:31:57 AM] Overhead: 1,547,648 bytes (1.48 Mb)
[12/26/2005 10:31:57 AM] Video size: 347,745,552 bytes (331.64 Mb)
[12/26/2005 10:31:57 AM] Running compressibility test.
[12/26/2005 10:35:01 AM] Duration was: 3 minutes 4 seconds
[12/26/2005 10:35:01 AM] Speed was: 12.61 fps.
[12/26/2005 10:35:01 AM] Compressibility percentage is: 55.96
[12/26/2005 10:35:01 AM] Chosen resolution is: 560×416 ( AR: 1.35 )
[12/26/2005 10:35:01 AM] Predicted comptest value is: 73.79%
[12/26/2005 10:35:01 AM] Running first pass.
[12/26/2005 11:02:56 AM] Duration was: 27 minutes 55 seconds
[12/26/2005 11:02:56 AM] Speed was: 23.10 fps.
[12/26/2005 11:02:56 AM] Expected quality of first pass size: 76.04%
[12/26/2005 11:02:56 AM] Running second pass.
[12/26/2005 11:42:42 AM] Duration was: 39 minutes 46 seconds
[12/26/2005 11:42:43 AM] Speed was: 16.22 fps.
[12/26/2005 11:42:43 AM] Job finished. Total time: 2 hours 35 minutes 15 seconds

You’re done! Delete everything except the .AVI file.

Note about Multiple Audio Tracks

Windows Media Player doesn’t always pick the right audio track if you have more than one. I recommend using VLC Media Player .