Software necessary to copy video from a commercial DVD into .avi files? (DVD ripping)

by philg

Friends of mine have a child afflicted with a kind of autism.  A parent of an autistic child has developed some free software (Windows-only) that teaches kids by asking them to perform tasks and showing them short video clips if they perform the task.  My friends own a collection of DVDs that they would like to transfer to the PC and chop up into 10-second segments.  I’m pretty sure that they can handle the chopping once they get their DVD into a standard Windows video format (.avi?).  As I understand it, Hollywood tries to make this as difficult as possible.  How can my friends work around the various encryption and other format conversion issues?  This would be on a WinXP machine.

13 thoughts on “Software necessary to copy video from a commercial DVD into .avi files? (DVD ripping)”

  1. As I understand it the semi-outlaw-ware called DeCSS will turn CSS-scrambled .VOB files into standard MPEG files that can be opened with e.g. Windows Movie Maker.

  2. Mmmm… you realize that the most cynical among your readers will interpret this as “MIT professor seeks help pirating DVDs”, right? 🙂

    Anyway, the software you need, in the following order, is:

    -SmartRipper. This one will rip the VOB files in the DVD (and decrypt their CSS protection; it comes with DeCSS integrated) and copy them into your hard drive.

    -DVD2AVI. You use this one to open the VOB files and save them into a “project file” (more on this later). It will also save the sound into a standard uncompressed WAV file.

    -VFAPI codec and converter. This program will convert the above mentioned project file into an AVI that uses the VFAPI “pseudo” codec.

    You can now open the AVI using most video editors. However, this AVI file cannot be played on its own; all it contains is a series of pointers to the VOB files (which you still need to keep). Therefore, it’s advisable to reencode the AVI using another codec that takes less space: the recommended ones are DIVX or XVID. Once you’ve reencoded it, you have a self-contained AVI that takes much less space than the original VOB files, that you can now delete. (The recommended program to do this reencoding is VirtualDub).

    You can download all these programs from http://www.doom9.org. Be advised that most of them are the kind of ad-hoc programs written by high-school kids or college students, and that a certain amount of manual labor is still necessary to “connect” the output of each one with the input of the next. (If there’s a better, more automated way to do it, I’d like to know too…).

  3. Although their software is built on Windows, does the computer that rips the DVD have to run Windows? I use mplayer on Linux to rip DVD’s. Here’s the command I ran just last night to rip “Manufacturing Consent”:

    mencoder dvd://1 -o manufacturing-consent.avi -oac copy -ovc lavc -aid 128

    After you download and install the software, it’s as easy as that.

    Ed

  6. The tool you want on Windows is Auto Gordian Knot aka AutoGK, http://www.autogk.net/ It combines all the various frobs you need to turn a DVD into a video file: ripper, decrypter, codecs, etc etc. The process is remarkably complex but AutoGK makes it pretty simple. It’s still kind of rough hackerware, but it’s the simplest and most automated of these tools that I’ve seen. A course 6 guy like you can probably figure it out.

  8. Ah yes, Gordian Knot. It’s basically a front-end for all the tools I mentioned above in my previous post. I haven’t used it because, like a good geek, I like to keep control of the process and stay close to the nuts and bolts of the system, but it probably could be useful to you.

  9. Um…at the risk of exposing my abysmal ignorance…what about simply playing the DVD’s and recording the images and sound off the TV using a camcorder then downloading the video to their computer and editing it from there. Quality with be lost, but the process might be easier and quicker.

  10. Bob: I don’t think you need to go to that extreme (and syncing a camcorder with a TV is not easy). One could play the DVD on a regular DVD player and send the analog video output into an analog video capture board on the PC. And I guess a 10-year-old kid wouldn’t be likely to complain about the lack of image/sound quality. But why buy the extra hardware when the raw PC is capable of doing the job with the correct (free) software?

  11. I might as well add my method of choice for ripping dvds here as well. My method is basically equivalent to about half of the above mentioned methods. I like to use a two step process that uses CladDVD to rip(and decrypt(also can remove macrovision from VOBs)) and FlaskMPEG to encode.

    All you have to do is click ‘rip full dvd’ in CladDVD. Then fire up FlaskMPEG, point it to the VOB files, and decide what codec you want to encode with, usually divx. Then set a few encoding options like bit-rate and wait 3 or 4 hours.

    I’d have to agree that VirtualDub is the best and easiest way to split-up the avi.

    I suspect that Eduardo’s method is actually the best way to rip the dvd, though I’ve never tried it.

  12. Use SmartRipper http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video_software/dvd_rippers/smartripper.cfm to decode the VOB’s into unencrypted files. Be sure to set the files to break at chapters instead of by file size, or you’ll end up with scenes broken across files.

    Now they’re MPEG2 compliant and can be used in most any program, unlike DivX and Xvid.

    VirtualDubMod http://virtualdubmod.sourceforge.net will open them right up to cut and reencode if necessary, but any app like Premeire will work directly with the files as they are.

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