Hello all, I'm looking to rip all my episodes of Seinfeld to an internal hard drive on my computer and watch them on my 32" monitor. I've got a couple of questions, what program should I use to rip them to my HDD and what would be a good player to watch them on, Media Player?
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DVDs on my HDD
- Thread starter dylskee
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Negative Decibel
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I'm sure you will get varying answers, but I would recommend DVDshrink, then handbrake...
Ur_Mom
Fully [H]
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Thats exactly what I use. I don't do much other than the defaults, either, and it turns out OK. I'm sure I can do a lot of tweaks and make them look better or smaller files. But, I've only ripped a few DVD's (20-30)...
Spartan805
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Dvdfab... Cuda enabled.
It rocks
It rocks
Joe Average
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First question would be do you want the individual episodes ripped to files, like MKV or MP4 (MKV is recommended for various reasons), or do you prefer to rip the entire DVD to the hard drive so you have access to everything meaning it'll play just as if the physical DVD was still in the drive (you "play" the VIDEO_TS.IFO file with your media player and you get the "normal" DVD experience...?
If you want to just do the full rip keeping the entire contents of the DVD, my recommendation is still going to be using DVDDecrypter - and if you happen to have some disc that it can't work with, then DVDFab or AnyDVD HD would rip the full contents of any retail DVD to the hard drive.
If you want to create individual video files for each episode of a TV show, then it's a bit more complex as you'll typically need to queue up the episodes on a single DVD for processing. HandBrake will always be my recommended tool for that: you'd load the DVD contents (once it's ripped the hard drive, or if you use AnyDVD HD it can read the physical disc in the drive), then pick the individual episodes one at a time, set the encoding options, toss that job in the queue, add the next episode, and so on till they're all queued up and ready to go. Hit Start and let it run overnight while you're sleeping and voila, nicely encoded MKV/MP4 files ready to go the next day.
You can keep the full surround soundtracks or drop it down to simple 2 channel stereo, keep the chapter markers so you can skip around if desired, and keep the subtitles/CC as well if needed.
With HandBrake doing the encodes (aka compressing) you can expect to get typical 30 minute TV shows in files about 250-375MB in size; a full hour show would end up being about 700-850MB depending on the level of compression (the default would be the CQ encoding option of 20 for HandBrake). Smaller files = worse picture quality; larger files = better, but realize you're working with DVD content which is 720x480 resolution (before aspect ratio) and it's just MPEG2 encoding to start with so it's not going to be super-sharp regardless.
If you want to just do the full rip keeping the entire contents of the DVD, my recommendation is still going to be using DVDDecrypter - and if you happen to have some disc that it can't work with, then DVDFab or AnyDVD HD would rip the full contents of any retail DVD to the hard drive.
If you want to create individual video files for each episode of a TV show, then it's a bit more complex as you'll typically need to queue up the episodes on a single DVD for processing. HandBrake will always be my recommended tool for that: you'd load the DVD contents (once it's ripped the hard drive, or if you use AnyDVD HD it can read the physical disc in the drive), then pick the individual episodes one at a time, set the encoding options, toss that job in the queue, add the next episode, and so on till they're all queued up and ready to go. Hit Start and let it run overnight while you're sleeping and voila, nicely encoded MKV/MP4 files ready to go the next day.
You can keep the full surround soundtracks or drop it down to simple 2 channel stereo, keep the chapter markers so you can skip around if desired, and keep the subtitles/CC as well if needed.
With HandBrake doing the encodes (aka compressing) you can expect to get typical 30 minute TV shows in files about 250-375MB in size; a full hour show would end up being about 700-850MB depending on the level of compression (the default would be the CQ encoding option of 20 for HandBrake). Smaller files = worse picture quality; larger files = better, but realize you're working with DVD content which is 720x480 resolution (before aspect ratio) and it's just MPEG2 encoding to start with so it's not going to be super-sharp regardless.