DVD Ripping Software

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MrAl
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DVD Ripping Software

Post by MrAl »

Hello there,

Anyone know of any decent DVD video movie ripping software? It should be free and work decently.

So far i downloaded two versions, but they both screw up the video in one way or another:
"Magic DVD Ripper" screws up the video so bad you can not watch the movie (i have a feeling it is beacuse of the copy protection that it does not know how to deal with).
"Free DVD Ripper" screws up the sound sync so that the people's lips move AFTER the sound they would make occurs.
"Alcohol 120" does not allow ripping of copy protected DVD's.
"Nero 8" also does not allow ripping of copy protected DVD's.
Note: if you set Free DVD Ripper to "Force Sound Sync" the sound in the resulting movie gets interrupted every couple seconds while it syncs the sound and that causes gaps in the sound which is entirely unacceptable as some people's words get entirely eliminated in the movie.



What i want to do is copy and compress a DVD i just bought (Gargoyles) and keep a copy on the computer so i can watch it from there rather than plug in the disk. The file size is usually reduced from some 4.4GB down to 900MB which is less than a quarter of the original size which is what i am also after. I can already copy the disk to the computer but it takes up about 4.4GB and my other movies only take from 700MB to 1000MB or less.

On a related note, i noticed that this very SAME movie i am trying to do is downloadable on the web for free but the language in in Hindi. I dont speak Hindi and i dont want to hear voices that are not the original actors anyway. The interesting point here though is that the ENTIRE movie only took up 230MB and although the video quality was not perfect at least the sound went in sync with the movie and it was very watchable that way too. I would very much like to shrink my other movies (and this one) down to 250MB or less if possible, so what could they have used to get it that small? It was MPG4 format BTW whereas the other movies are all .avi format, except Gargoyles which is VIDEO_TC (VOB) format in multiple files. This is a second question though as i would be somewhat happy if i could get the format into avi and less than 1000MB file size (700MB to 1000MB) like my other movies.


Thanks...
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Janitor Tzap
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Re: DVD Ripping Software

Post by Janitor Tzap »

Hi MrAl,

Welcome to the world of streaming and torrenting videos. :P

Unfortunately what your doing is just what many people have been trying to do for a few years now.
What i want to do is copy and compress a DVD i just bought (Gargoyles) and keep a copy on the computer so i can watch it from there rather than plug in the disk.
It may be easier to just pop it into the DVD drive on the computer. :lol:

The Disney Videos have one of the toughest copy guards on them.
There was a program, X-Copy DVD that gets around the copy guard.
But this basically is for making exact copies of the original DVD onto another DVD Disc.

As for compressing the video down.
Your just going to have to continue experimenting.

Try different resolutions, aspect ratios, formats, etc....
Till you can find the one combination that will give you the best results.

Thou....
You may find another copy of it streaming on line.
Check out the Anime sites.
They will sometimes have stuff available for viewing, or downloading.
Or check out the video up load/down load sites.

Well good luck in your endeavor. :wink:


Signed: Janitor Tzap
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MrAl
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Re: DVD Ripping Software

Post by MrAl »

Hi again,


Thanks for the ideas.

I downloaded Decrypter and was able to use that to decrypt the disk, then used MediaCoder to make a compressed version. Apparently MediaCoder lets you make the output file size what you want so you can compress it more or less. If the compress is set too high it comes out a bit blotchy, but that's to be expected. With normal settings it comes out about 1/5 the size of a real DVD yet the quality seems very good. That's about standard i think.

There is one remaining problem however. That is that the DVD disk files come as several different files like File1.VOB, File2.VOB, File3.VOB, etc., and what the decrypter does is just decrypts those files into other files with the same names, and what MediaCoder does is takes those files and compresses them and changes the file type and extension so you get:
File1.mp4, File2.mp4, File3.mp4, etc. That means the movie is broken up into several pieces even after recoding. Now i need a way to put all these pieces together to make one large file FileAll.mp4 and i havent found a way to do that yet. It could be that MediaCoder does this but i havent found a setting for it yet. For my movie the number of output files was four, so to watch the whole movie i'd have to click on the first file, watch it, then when it ends click on the second file, watch it, etc., until the last fourth file was done. It works, but it's not as nice as having it all in one file so you can watch the whole movie without interruption.
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MrAl
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Re: DVD Ripping Software

Post by MrAl »

Hello again,


Ok, thank you, i'll give it a shot.
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Re: DVD Ripping Software

Post by reloadron »

Though it has been awhile I have always had good luck using DVD Shrink which can be had here.

Ron
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MrAl
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Re: DVD Ripping Software

Post by MrAl »

Hi again,


Ron:
That was one of the first programs i was going to try but unfortunately the page i found when i searched for these tools said it was not free but something like 25 dollars so i rejected it. Do you know if there is a free version? I did try Handbrake however as that was free and it works pretty nice. It allows you to set the output file size too so you can control the compression, and it took all of the VOB files and made one big Mp4 file which was just what i wanted.

Karma:
Thanks again, i tried it and it worked pretty well and didnt take long at all to figure out how to work it. I'm still experimenting with different file sizes to see what is the smallest i can get the movie and still see a nice picture. I was able to get it down to around 420MB so far and it doesnt look too bad.

General:
Im quite amazed by these softwares as the whole movie can be shrunk down quite a bit. I found out that the raw video data is something like 500GB or more which would take up half a modern hard drive, so we'd be lucky to store 2 movies on one hard drive, but the standard DVD takes it down to 4.4GB roughly and further compression takes it down to about 750MB while still getting very good quality. There is a lot of information in a whole 90 minute movie so there must be some heavy duty compression going on there. I know some of it is based on movement between two frames, but still it's quite amazing. My smallest file size so far is 250MB, and that's for the whole 87 minute movie! It's not picture perfect at that size but still very watchable. That's quite amazing. To think that that is the size of what 10 nice quality still pictures once was, and movies have over 100000 frames!
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reloadron
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Re: DVD Ripping Software

Post by reloadron »

Hi Ya MrAl

The link I posted has it free from File Hippo Downloads. The download is on the right side of the page top. Handbrake is also great.

R$on
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MrAl
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Re: DVD Ripping Software

Post by MrAl »

Hi again,

Oh ok thanks.
I've been playing with these programs now for a little while and found that if you set them at various compression levels you can get either a larger file or a smaller mp4 file. The difference in file size is astonishing too. For something around 60 percent compression i get a file size of around 700 or 750MB, but for around 50 percent compression (same movie) i get a little over 400MB. Even at 50 percent compression though the 400MB movie looks almost as good as the 700MB version and by 'almost as good' i mean it is quite hard to tell the difference in quality.

I also shrunk a whole season of Monk down from 370MB each episode to about 260MB for each episode so i was able to fit a whole season on one DVD disk! 16 episodes per season so that's only about 4.2GB per season! The quality is just as good but i cant go any lower than that or the quality starts to suffer.
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reloadron
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Re: DVD Ripping Software

Post by reloadron »

I also shrunk a whole season of Monk down from 370MB each episode to about 260MB for each episode so i was able to fit a whole season on one DVD disk! 16 episodes per season so that's only about 4.2GB per season! The quality is just as good but i cant go any lower than that or the quality starts to suffer.
LMAO, my wife Kathy is a big time Monk fan and has a pile of seasons. :) Actually I enjoy the show also.

Ron
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MrAl
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Re: DVD Ripping Software

Post by MrAl »

Hi Ron,

Yeah i think it's one of the best shows ever. I like the way they alternate comedy and drama, so you dont get bored ha ha. It works too. Yeah Monk is really funny and so are the other characters...really have to chuckle.
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kheston
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Re: DVD Ripping Software

Post by kheston »

MrAl,

Have you looked at VideoLan.org? It does the DVD part and then some.

--K
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MrAl
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Re: DVD Ripping Software

Post by MrAl »

Hi there,

No i havent heard of that until you mentioned it. I'll have to take a look i guess. I was using the other stuff so pretty much did everything i needed to do so far, but it cant hurt to look at more software. Thanks for the idea.

LATER:
Ok took a look, but that looks like a media player?
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kheston
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Re: DVD Ripping Software

Post by kheston »

It has a convert/save function that can transcode your media into various formats. I use it all the time.

Glad you have things working, regardless.
Kurt - SF Bay
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