DVD ripping

[Sheaf Saint]

Right, I've had enough of my DVD collection taking up space and looking untidy, so I want to rip them all and store them on my USB drive so I can get rid of the discs.

 

Can anybody recommend a good ripping application that will allow this? I've searched online and can't seem to find any that don't charge an absolute fortune for the licence to rip protected DVDs.

[Pugwash]

Don't bother with the plethora of programs that claim to be able to rip anything to any format and cost $$ or ££. These two programs really are all you need:

 

DVD Decrypter (it's free) to rip the DVDs to folders on your hard drive. Then use Handbrake (also free) to encode them into MKV or MP4 files. Handbrake can be a bit daunting to start with, particularly the audio and subtitles side of things. I find the standard MKV H.264 settings work well and select search for foreign subtitles. Have a few trials with it and you'll pick it up. Oh and don't worry if you get a series of error message from DVD Decrypter when you shut it down, it just seems to be a bug and doesn't affect the ripping at all.

 

This two-step combination gives good quality files with reasonable file sizes. Ripping speed is generally about 20 minutes for a typical DVD, with a further 25-30 minutes or so to encode. Speeds will vary according to the power of your PC - best if you're using 64-bit PC and software. Handbrake can rip straight from the DVD and encode in one process, but every time I've tried it, it's taken longer than the two-step process. Also the great benefit of using the two-step approach is that you can rip a batch of DVDs to your hard drive, then queue up the files to encode in handbrake and leave your PC to crunch through them unattended. It will even shut down your PC when it's finished, if you wish.

 

The other very quick alternative is to use MakeMKV. I used this initially to rip my collections. This will rip a DVD straight to an MKV file in about 20-25 minutes. One downside is that the file can be incompatible with some players. I got a Sony Blu-ray player that was supposed to play MKV files, but wouldn't play these, even though they played quite happily through my WDTV media player. The other downside is that the files are large - about 2GB per hour of movie. This is 2-3 times the size of the files produced by Handbrake as above.

 

Hope that helps.

[Sheaf Saint]

Cheers for that Pugwash. I'll search for those when I have time.