Ripping main movie and having playable .avi/mp4?

TheGardenTool

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I'm deploying to Iraq early next year and would like to begin digitizing my DVD collection so I can take them on an external hard drive with me.

I've never successfully ripped any DVDs before so I don't even know where to begin other than what I've tried to find online.

There's a couple things I'd like to do if its possible:
I only want the main part of the movie, no previews, no extras, no subtitles, etc.
If the DVD's could be easily unconverted to a 720p resolution that would be fantastic.
I want to maintain good video and audio quality.
I also need acceptable file size. I won't be burning these once I digitize them so no need to make a specific target size but just good enough to have what I need and not be 4GB a movie or anything...

I'd like to start working on doing this now as I'm looking at probably 200-250 movies by the end of the movie I'd like to have done.
 
I've never used DVDFlick. It looks like a pretty good program to try out but I don't have any experience with it. My method for ripping my movies to xvid has worked pretty well though. I use AnyDVD to break encryption, DVD Shrink to reauthor the movie so it only rips the main movie file, and then use AutoGK to convert to avi with ac3 audio.

I set the target quality to 70%. That usually leaves me with a video file that can be anywhere from 1 to 3gb with 1.5g being the most common out of 300+ movies and good enough quality to look fine on my 32" lcd, 50" lcd and on my laptop.

As for setting it to 720p, I wouldn't do that. The computer is going to be able to upscale much more effectively than a ripping program would be able to. I have AutoGK automatically set the width but it always come out to 720.

I don't have time to write up a complete guide for you right now since I have to go to work but when I get home I can give you step by step instructions with a few programs. That way you can test which one works best for you. It took me doing the same DVD about 20 times with 5 different programs to find settings that looked good and weren't too big.
 
To keep the file size down further, with AutoGK you can compress the audio into VBR MP3 format as well (instead of AC3 which is bigger). You'd lose any 5.1 / Dolby related things but still have quality sound.
 
I use DVD Fab for my Dvd-ripping. It allows you to extract just the main movie from a DVD. After that, just find a program to convert the DVD files to more compressed formats, as DVD Fab makes rather large files,
 
i havent used dvdshrink in a while but i have an inkling you can just rip the main movie portion and it will leave it as a dvd file...something with "TS" in the file name. anyway vlc plays those files just fine...dvdshrink would allow you to modify file size also. sorry for being vague i'm not home to verify this.
 
If you have Nero installed then you can use Nero Recode to convert the main movie to mp4, its probably the easiest tool ive ever used and probably second best in terms of quality.

If you want the very best in terms of quality then use a x264 GUI (such as staxrip/megui) but these are more complicated. As normal when encoding, the better the quality the longer to encode.
 
I second the vote for Nero Digital w/AnyDVD - awesome quality, and all others apps should learn from it's interface - doesn't get much easier.

If you have Nero installed then you can use Nero Recode to convert the main movie to mp4, its probably the easiest tool ive ever used and probably second best in terms of quality.

If you want the very best in terms of quality then use a x264 GUI (such as staxrip/megui) but these are more complicated. As normal when encoding, the better the quality the longer to encode.
 
Using DVD Shrink to rip DVDs and AutoGK to convert to AVI.

Steps 1 & 2 - Select your DVD drive containing the movie you want to rip. After you hit OK the DVD Shrink will analyze the movie.
Step1.jpg


Step 3 - Click on the Re-author button.
Step 4(labeled 3 in the pic for some reason) - Drag the Main Movie file over to the DVD Structure box. (In this example my dvd has already been ripped to the drive but there will be more items such as menus, bonus content and other things besides the main movie file.)
step2.jpg


Step 5 - Click on the Compression Settings tab. Here there will normally be a 6ch English audio file along with in most cases French, Spanish and 2ch English and sometimes director commentaries. There will also be subtitle files in the three big languages. For our purposes you will only want to leave the 6ch or 2ch English files and in most cases subtitles in case there are non-English parts(if they are not needed they will not show in the final movie file)
step3.jpg


Step 6 - Click the Backup button
Step 7 - Make sure your backup target is set to Hard Disk Folder.
Step 8 - Hit OK.
step4.jpg


Open AutoGK once DVD Shrink is finished

Step 9 - Select the first VTS file, in most cases it is VTS_01_0.
Step 10 - Click Open
step5.jpg


Step 10.5 - I left out a numbered step but you will also need to set an output file location.
(I recommend against outputting directly to C:\ if you are using Vista because it will do all the work but then the actual file will not write to the C:\ directory. I would recommend encoding to a 2nd hard drive or creating a directory called Movies or DVDs.)
Step 11 - Click the Add Job button to add the movie to the Queue.
Step 12 - Hit the Start button to begin the process.
Below the next picture are the settings I use for encoding my movies but you may find different settings more to your liking
step6.jpg



My Settings for AutoGK (I use target percentage for file size and quality because defining a size will make AutoGK run a 2nd pass which effectively doubles to encode time.
step7.jpg
 
I use DVDDecrypter + AnyDVD. DVDShrink is also good.

Handbrake is great for re-encoding.
 
SC385: Thanks for the steps and visuals as I finally got a playable movie with sound! It does take awhile to do this but it'll be nice in the end when I can watch my movies while overseas. I got a 1.5 hour movie down to a little over 1GB so that doesn't seem too bad. It looked good even while running full screen in WMP11 on a 24" monitor.
 
No problem. When I first started, I would rip about 12 movies to my hard drive and set up AutoGK to do those 12 while I was sleeping right through when I was done with classes. So, If you have the hard drive space then I would do it so you can keep movies going while at work, in class, asleep, etc.
 
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