Tutorial – DVD Ripping

Posted on July 17, 2009 by Stuart

I have to preface this post by saying that neither I nor any members of CTM
condone the ripping of DVDs or any other source for personal or commercial gain.
This article discusses techniques to copy content that you legally own to other formats.

I was discussing the Traxdata USB Multimedia Player (more on this another time … or join in the conversation on this in forum) with a friend the other day and his basic question was “what good is it to me?”. I then explained how one could store the family movies, copies of DVDs you owned, etc and play them back without having to resort to digging out the originals every time. It’s a boon in my house because my children love to watch videos of themselves time after time after time … and even DVDs will wear out eventually – plus there’s the problem of scratches to the surface that only my children seem to be able to manage. Now all I need is a USB stick or drive.

Anyway – that’s for another time. My friend shot back with the fact that his PC always complains about his DVDs being copy protected. I then spent a little time with him showing how he could still easily rip his DVDs and it dawned on me that this could be a useful little tutorial for CTM. So without further ado, here’s my “how to rip almost anything to hard drive so that you can play it back on your TV, iPod, etc” tutorial. I should add that this is for a PC specifically and I will address the Mac another time if there’s demand.

First you are going to need two freeware utilities – both have a long history and so long as you go to a reliable source I can pretty much guarantee they will be clean. The apps you need are Handbrake and DVD43. Handbrake will run on a PC, Mac (Intel or PPC) and *nix platforms you just need to make sure you get the right flavour. Once you’ve grabbed these, installed and rebooted your PC (DVD43 requires this) then we’re good to go.

Once you’ve rebooted, fire up DVD43 (it typically puts an icon on your desktop and your quick launch toolbar) and you will see an icon appear in your system tray. This has three modes.

- no DVD inserted

- DVD inserted and happy to continue

- DVD inserted but I’m doing my thing.

Once you have your green smiley face then you can fire up Handbrake (or your favourite burning utility) and begin to rip for real.

So open up Handbrake and click on the source button – various options will present themselves but as we are ripping from a DVD you will need to select your DVD drive. If you have a standard DVD in then Handbrake will automatically pick up on the drive and its contents – simply select this.

Your next step is to select the destination – here you simply need enough space to store the ripped file.

Next we need to pick the output format and change any other settings we desire – however I strongly suggest you go with the defaults until you are comfortable with playing. Depending on the format you pick there will be other options you can select – such as “web optimized” or “iPod support”. In my case I’m going with an AVI File as this is one of the options supported by the Traxdata unit.

The final step is to click on start and let it do its business. A word of warning though – depending on how powerful your machine is, this ripping process could take upwards of several hours. It’s a set it and leave it process as far as I’m concerned. One option to speed it up slightly is to select the FFmpeg in the codec box on the video tab.

As you can see – Handbrake is an extremely simple but highly complex beast with many options to adjust including subtitles in a specific language (assuming the original has them) or forcing the subtitles on to ripping specific chapters or episodes to forcing the content to fit to a specific output size. And so on.

However the latest version of Handbrake includes many presets that have been found to do most of what you will want. So in the presets section you can select the output to be for a PSP or an iPhone or animation or … at last count there was over 18 presets with 5 output formats making for a lot of choice.

Apart from my dire warning at the start about CTM not condoning the ripping of DVDs for illegal use I do need to add that as laws vary from country to country then you’ll need to be aware of what affects your rights in your country. That said, I haven’t yet heard of (though it wouldn’t surprise me to learn the opposite) a case where you as the legal owner of a DVD have been sued for copyright infringement or similar when you’ve made a backup of the content or moved it to another platform.

I’ll finish by adding that if you aren’t ripping copy protected content then you don’t need to utilise DVD43 but please be conscious of any copying you do and if in doubt seek the permission from the creator of the content.

Happy ripping and please do join the forum conversation to share your views, your tools and the why you do this.

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