It's easy to copy and convert your movies to
any format for steaming, watching on the go, or maintaining an archival
backup for your movie collection. We will show you how.
We've become so
accustomed to be easy and convenience of iTunes and
blink-and-you-miss-em CD rips that we forget how it in mid-1990s,
ripping a CD was a time-consuming process fraught with peril. Shoot,
ripping a single disc to a 128kps MP3 could take eight hours on a
200MHz Pentium! Fast forward a decade and faster hardware and better
software have made CD ripping so mainsteam your mom does it.
Now
ripping DVDs is our great challenge. Copying and transcoding the disc's
video into more efficient formats involves math an order of magnitude
scarier than what's required to rip audio CDs. A machine that will rip
the latest Miley Cyrus CD in mere moments could take hours to extract
and convert your copy of Alien vs. Predator to an iPod-friendly format.
But with the right software, a quad-core-equipped PC, and a little
knowhow, you can cut your disc-rip time from hours to 30 minutes.
Plenty of tricks and traps still await first-time rippers, but we'll
show you the basics and then walk you through some of the most valuable
power-user ripping secrets.
Your
first decision is simple. What player are you ripping your disc for?
Are you ripping for a portable player, like the PSP or iPhone? Would
you rather stream to a device in your living room, like Xbox 360, PS3,
or Popcorn Hour? Or are you simply interested in making
archival-quality DVD rips in case you lose your collection? More
likely, you are looking for a combination of all these of these things.
We'll show you how to rip your DVD to a file suitable for streaming
that consumes a fraction of the disk space of a DVD but maintains full
video whatever other devices you might have, like a PSP or an iPod.
With the preliminaries out of the way, let's get started.
Ripping your DVDs
With
the right software, hardware, and understanding of the issues, you can
free video from movies disc to be used any way you choose.
Compatibility issues
Several
factors determine the compatibility of your ripped video files. The
resolution of the video, the size of the resulting file, the video and
audio codes, the container format used, and even more esoteric things
like frame rate can affect whether your video will work on your device
of choice. The Xbox and PS3, for instance, support a maximum MP4 file
size of 4GB. If you want to srteam a file larger than that, you'll need
to use a .ts container for the PS3 and WMV-HD the Xbox.
If
you just rip discs as you need the content and then delete files
afterward, simply rip to your target of choice. Howerer, if you want to
build an archive of ripped movies, we recommend that you use open,
widely supported codes and containers at the native resolution of the
DVD and then transcode the files to lower resolutions and bitrates as
you need them. Naturally, we will show you how to do this.
Your
player selection also impacts your choices when it comes to audio
tracks and subtitle support. While the most common container formats,
MP4 and MKV, support multiple track and subtitle stream in one file,
few players will work with multiple audio tracks, and an even smaller
subset will work with subtitles. That means you need to rip a single
audio track-typically the mail movie's English soundtrack-and burn the
subtitles into the video, rather than leave them as separate streams
inside the container.
We recommend
convert dvd to the MP4 container: it's widely supported on both
streaming devices and portables. Furthermore, the tools for
manipulating the streams within the file are established to transcode
your video to a less-supported format for a specific player.
A word about subtitles
Typically,
DVDs include multiple subtitle streams that serve different purposes.
Nearly, every DVD has some English subtitles, even non-foreign-language
movies. Most also include subtitles. Subtitles are simply the dialogue
from the movie written across bottom of the screen. Closed captions
include subtitles, but they also include audio cues that help people
with impaired hearing enjoy the movie fully.
Often
English-language movies use forced subtitles to show what a character
speaking a foreign language is saying. On some discs, these subtitles
will be hidden in a separate stream, while in others, they'll be mixed
in with the subtitles but marked so that the DVD Player only shows the
proper captions. Regardless, it's crucial that you get the proper
subtitles for all the films you rip. Otherwise, you'll never know what
Jabba or Greedo are saying in Star Wars.
In
practice, the first English subtitle track is typically the one that
includes subtitles, forced or otherwise, while the second subtitle
track is the one that includes closed captions.
Bypassing copy protection
The
first thing you will need to do when ripping a movie DVD is remove the
copy protection. Most discs use a variant of the Content Scrambling
System(CSS), but many also use other techniques. Although some
DVD-ripping apps, like autoMKV, can bypass copy protection, they are
not updated as frequently and aren't always successful at defeating new
copy protection schemes. The latest version of Handbrake won't do
anything at all about copy protection. Your best choice , therefore, is
to top one of the utilities that are dedicated to the task, such as
Daniusoft DVD Ripper or DVD3.
Daniusoft
DVD ripper justifies its high price by bypassing new forms of
encryption almost immediately after they appear. Both apps serve as
on-the-fly disc decrypters, stripping copy protection before your
ripping or playback software recognizes the disc. Want o rip an
encrypted disc to your hard drive? It is as easy as coping contents of
the disc's VIDEO_TS files to your hard drive one you installed
Daniusoft DVD Ripper or DVD43. Regardless, before we continue, you
should install one of the apps. Daniusoft dvd ripper is a shareware,
while DVD43 is always free.
Ripping your first Disc
For
simple, high-quality rips of any kind of content for any type of
device, it's tough to beat HandBrake. We like HandBrake for a few
reasons: Its built-in presets make it very easy for anyone to use, it
does a good job of detecting the proper video, audio, and the subtitle
selections, and it has never failed us.
To
rip your first disc, drop it in your DVD drive and click the Source
button in the top-left conver of the HandBrake window. Unless you have
multiple optical drives, the disc in your DVD drive should be one of
the listed Source options. If it's not, select the folder option and
navigate to your optical drive. Handbrake will take a minute or two to
scan the contents of your disc and will do its best to determine the
appropriate titles and chapters on the disc. HandBrake is generally
spot-on for movie DVDs, although you'll probably need to manually
select the proper chapters and titles for discs that contain TV shows.
After
Handbrake has familiarized itself with your disc, you will need to
select the proper output preset. For steaming to or playbackon most
Apple devices, the Apple Universal preset is terrific. It looks great
and works well on the iPhone, newer iPod Classics, and the AppleTV. For
steaming
DVD to mpeg,
dvd to quicktime,
dvd to wmv, dvd to the PS3, Xbox360, or pretty much anything else, we
typically recommend a modified PS3 preset. The PS3 preset uses the
H.264 video codec in an MP4 container to encode your disc's video at
its native resolution using a variable bitrate that's also compatible
with the Xbox 360. It automatically downmixes your disc 5.1 audio to
2.0 Dolby proLogicII stream. Load the defaut PS3 preset and then enable
both the two-pass encode and the turbo first-pass options. Both the
Apple Universal and the modified PS3 preset are appropriate for
archival puposes.
Next flip to the
Audio & Subtitles tab and ensure that the proper subtitle and audio
selections are checked. If the movie includes some subtitles, you
should select the first English subtitle track and check the Forced
Subtitles Only box. Don't worry, if the disc is mastered properly and
doesn't have subtitles, it won't affect your rip at all. Once you are
happy with your setting, you can press the +button in the preset window
to save your profile(we recommend giving it a different default name
than the others). Unfortunately, caption settings aren't saved in
presets, so you have no manually set them each time you rip another
disc.
Before you can start the
encode, you need to tell HandBrake where to save the finished rip and
what to call it. You can save the resulting file anywhere on your hard
drive. Once you've done that, press the Start button to begin the
encode.Depending on the number of cores you have and the speed of your
processor, encoding can take anywhere from 40 minutes to several hours.
