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3. Ripping the VOBs

This part is rather easy. All you need is some free space (a lot of free space actually). Depending on what you want to transcode you should have 10G of free space available. If you don't spend some bucks on a new drive, they are really cheap at the moment (like 100€ for a 80G drive).

Before you do anything else think about the region code. All drives shipped today have RPC mode 2 protection - that means that you can only switch your region code five times before it is locked. You can get information about how to remove the region code from your drive over at Digital Digest. So why am I mentioning this? The ripping methods mentioned below rely on the drive to have the correct region code (read: the same as the DVD that's inserted) or no region code at all. All error messages are kind of cryptic and it's often not very clear that you have a region code related problem when ripping fails. So keep that in mind.

First test the DVD. Fire up MPlayer and watch the first title: mplayer -dvd 1. Do you like it? Cool. Make sure you remember whether the video is interlaced or not (see below). Close MPlayer.

3.1. Interlaced video

What you see on television are not 25 frames per second. In fact you see 50 half-frames per second (I'm talking about PAL here - NTSC has 29,97 fps or nearly 60 half-frames per second). One frame contains the odd rows, one frame contains the even rows. That way you'll get 25 fps. The problem is that those half frames are taken from different times. If you have fast horizontal movement you will then see that an object (or person) is at one position for the odd rows and at another for the even rows. These are artifacts you don't want to have in your final video. Now take a look at this interlaced picture taken from my Ally McBeal DVD. With the appropriate filters you can eliminate the effect of interlacing (called de-interlacing... what a surprise ;)). Here's the same picture with de-interlacing enabled.

Now that you have an idea what interlacing looks like you should be able to decide for yourself whether your DVD contains interlaced material or not.

For the rest of this guide I'm assuming the following:

Please substitute these paths with paths that apply to your system.

There are a lot of ways to rip the VOBs. I'll present two: using a command line tool (vobcopy) and using the transcode GUI dvd::rip. You don't have to do both :-)

3.2. ...using the command line interface

Now run vobcopy. It will automagically copy all VOBs that belong to the title with the most chapters onto your hard disk. This will copy the VOBs from the DVD and write them to the current directory (which you can alter with e.g. -o /space). They will be named after the DVD's title (e.g. I have ALLY_MCBEAL_DISC21-1.vob, ALLY_MCBEAL_DISC21-2.vob etc.). The -m switch causes vobcopy to actually mirror the DVD's contents including the .IFO files - useful because you can then use the local copy with MPlayer/MEncoder or transcode just like it was a real DVD. It will take some time. Just be patient.

Note from the author (Robos): vobcopy has some problems following angles. You might get duplicate scenes with e.g. "The Matrix". I'm working on it.

Another note from Robos: There's another new utility called dvdbackup that can also copy DVDs.

3.3. ...using dvd::rip

dvd::rip can do the same job for you.
Fire up dvd::rip by typing dvdrip. You'll see the main window. Chose Edit / Preferences and dvd::rip will come up with the preferences dialog. Here you'll have to enter your paths. The first is the path to the DVD device and not the mount point. Often it is /dev/dvd which is a symlink to the real device, e.g. /dev/hdc.

Close that dialog. Now start a new project (File / New Project). It will start with the storage tab. Again enter the correct paths. Note how the other name fields change when you change the project title.

Change over to the Rip Title tab and press the Read DVD Table of Contents button. After a second or two the list below will be populated with the titles that are stored on the DVD. Just select the title you want to rip (you can select multiple titles by holding CTRL and clicking on them). Chose the language and the angle. Leave Specify Chapter Mode on No. Last step: press Rip selected Title(s)/Chapter(s). Again be patient. Drink some milk. Have a nice chat with your girlfriend.

The rest of dvd::rip will be covered later in chapter 4.

table of contents   --> next chapter   <-- previous chapter  this guide was written by Moritz Bunkus