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DVD Decrypter is still useful
DVD Fab is also useful
DVD Shrink is useful
Freemake Video Converter can do wonders.

http://www.doom9.net/ is your friend.

Yup, almost exactly what I do (I forgot to mention DVDShrink). I also found DVD+R better, but only because my burner is slightly faster with +R. Oh, I did find that Taiyo Yuden discs seemed to give me the best results too.

I also used some of the guides at doom9.net to fine tune DVDShrink.

If it says "Title 1 of 99" - congratulations! (ignore the "Track" info)

Note the most humorous thing about this copyright structure is it's glaring simplicity to avoid, much like the "marker over the encrypted" sector trick - they came out with this idea, and immediately ripper programmers thought "oh well, we'll just skip any unreferenced track." doom9 is littered with with forum info and workarounds that were found immediately.

I don't blame Sony for trying (it is their job to try to protect their material - despite the flames I may get for saying that), but any exec that creates a copyright strategy that can be so easily circumnavigated while alienating customers should be immediately fired.

Never used it since it's windows only but VirtualDub is pretty popular. It's GNU GPL too.

For more advices on the subject, just go to doom9 (check the guides) they have everything you need (and more).

http://www.doom9.net/

You want a multi-pass, high quality encoder to create your output files. For video and on Windows, I suggest Tsunami Mpeg Encoder (TMPGEnc). It's been a few years since I've messed with any of this, but it was quite good and inexpensive 3-4 years ago. It does 2-pass encoding and can output any number of DVD-compatible formats.

If you're still having problems, you might try reducing the resolution. DVD supports 704(720) or 352 vertical lines. Obviously quality suffers as you reduce resolution, but if you're having problems squeezing your content onto a DVD at 720 lines, you may just get an overall increase in quality this way.

Also, you don't talk much about your audio. Is it raw audio (which is really big and uses up lots of room on the disc that could be devoted to video)? You may have good results compressing this, as well.

I like http://www.doom9.net/ for all things video/dvd/vcd. They have a number of guides which detail the various methods of compression and burning. It's pretty likely that you'll find the tips you need there.

well i took on the project of backing up all my DVD's to my media server, and then building a lightweight DVR HTPC...well i found the ultimate in online dvd back up knowledge...

http://www.doom9.net/

granted most of the software is based for a windows box...but if you go to the forums you can find a section dedicated for mac and *nix users...that should help you alot....

as far as keeping all the spicial features, its possible, the easiest way, rip to iso, and then mount... but if you want to compress them to mp4, you may lose the little extra vidoe bits (unless you rip those seperatly)...but keeping the extra languages audio tracks and the sub tracks isnt that big of a deal.

i know the .ogm container supports multi audio track as well as multi sub, and i believe the .mkv container supports all the abouve pluse scene selection...im not 100% sure (as i only rip the main movie in .avi with any forced subs) but if anyone can help...its the fair use freedom fighters over at doom 9

So yeah Xvid is not bad choice at all, I would suggest looking into Quicktime though, since its more ubiquitous.

If you are working with Xvid I would also suggest using vdub for editing/encoding your movies. Check out Doom9 for several guides/faq's and general help for working with these videos.

Omitting the ones that have been well-referenced by other posters:

• ConText
• Media Player Classic
• VideoLAN
• Gordian Knot (note: included DivX 5.x codec can be installed in ad-free mode, but encoding is restricted)
• Foobar2000

More to come as I think of them.

www.doom9.net

WOW! Just imagine how much completely legal, free or open source DVD ripping software you could store on one of those!

A useful site for all things high(ish) quality video encoding, aimed at dvd backups to cd, is Doom9 - see their last round of codec comparisons. (Frame based, so you'll need to click through from the beginning to get the menu frames etc.)

Check doom9.net for details on this approach... use DVDDecrypter to rip the DVDs as an ISO image, then use Daemon Tools to mount the ISO in a virtual DVD drive. Works perfectly.

Right on the front page (after updates to two similar products are mentioned btw!) they have the following interesting comment:

Last but not least, 321 Studios have lost in court in the first instance. A San Francisco judge granted the MPAA an injunction against 321 Studios, barring them from selling their DVDXCopy products. While I have not been a fan of 321 ever since they started selling freeware software and a guide as DVD backup solution (note that the DVDXCopy products have actually been developed by 321), this is definitely not a good development. Judge Illston went on record saying that people were free to make copies in other, nondigital ways that would give them access to the same content, even if not in the same, pristine form. Miss Illston, if you have a minute I invite you to come over and I'll show you how your statement is completely false and shows a lack of understanding for what the movie industry is actually doing. I also invite you to have a look at Macrovision's offering in analogue copy protection. Under the DMCA which you're defending, analogue copying is also prohibited because it is illegal to manufacture a device that does not react to the Macrovision signal corruption (that's right.. Macrovision Quality Protection my lower rear end!).

http://www.doom9.net/

No, it's very easy to rip a dvd to get the sound out... etc..

See www.doom9.net for guides on the topic

If it's a 4.35GB disc, I just use DVDDecryptor. If it's larger, there are a number of things you can try.

DVDShrink allows you to shrink any given video stream on the disc and strip out some audio streams. Sometimes you can compress the extras on a disc enough so that the main movie isn't compressed at all, yet the entire DVD (including structure) still fits on one DVD-R. Failing that, you can pick and choose Titles (basically video streams) to use, but then you lose the disc structure, menus, etc. You can also compress the main movie a bit within DVDShrink, and this is almost always enough to get my backup (most of the extras I don't care about; just deleted scenes and on /some/ discs I like behind the scenes featurettes.)

If you want to keep the structure and you have some time to kill, you can reencode the DVD. DoItFastForYou, ReAuthorist, and DoCCE4You is a suite of programs designed to make this as easy as possible, but you need access to some high-dollar software (CinemaCraft Encoder, for one) are required, though. The suite can even export the output as a Sonic Scenarist (DVD Authoring software) project, however again, Scenarist is quite expensive. Information about all of the above is available at http://www.doom.net.

Finally, you can keep the structure of the DVD but delete any titles you don't want by inserting a 1 second blank clip in place of that video stream. However you really need to know the IFO structure in order to do this, and use IFOEdit (available at the above URL.)

With software programs like:

DVD Decrypter - DVD Decrypter is a CSS decryption tool that has most, if not all, of the features of current ripper/ripper GUIs like CladDVD, Smart-Ripper or VOBDec GUI, including CSS authentication/detection, multi-angle processing, Macrovision and Region removal. Also includes option to use either VOBDec or DeCSS Plus to decrypt the DVD.
NanDUB DiVX 3.11 ;-) encoder.
VirtualDubMod - VirtualDubMod is based on the famous video editing software VirtualDub by Avery Lee. Used for DiVX 5.x and XViD encoding
DVD2AVI - Takes a DVD and turns it into an AVI or AVI FrameServer for other programs like NanDub and VirtualDuB to encode with.
BeSweet - an audio transcoding tool. it lets you convert audio files from one format to another. supported formats : MP3,AC3,WAV,MP2,AVI,Aiff,VOB,Ogg Vorbis.
TMpegEnc - video encoding software. mainly used for the creation of MPEG's encoded for either VCD or SVCD
DVD2SVCD - Software Suite for converting a DVD into an SVCD (MPEG-2 encoded Video CD).
Gordian Knot - Gordian Knot started out as a simple bitrate calculator for DivX encoding but has evolved to become an integrated package or tool for the entire process of DivX encoding. It now has the ability to calculate the bitrates for XViD

And sites like

Doom9 - The definitive resource for DVD backup
DVDR Help - This site will help you to make your own VideoCDs, SVCDs or DVDs that can be played on your standalone DVD Player from video sources like DVD, Video, TV, Cam or downloaded movie clips like DivX, MOV, RM, WMV and ASF
DiVX Digest - a DiVX news and reviews site.

And many more like the ones above make it easy for encryption and DRM schemes to be broken or bypassed, but the process is far from trivial. These programs aren't exactly user friendly. The formats that come out of these programs while not very noticable do make a degredated (?sp) copy that is compressed more than the original. The files may look rather nice, but they are definantelly not as perfect as a standard DVD player.

People want to be able to plug their DVD's into their DVD players. I don't really know how many people rely on their computer solely for DVD playback, but I'm assuming not many.

Here's the kicker I know that I use my computer to watch videos that I own, but if I'm going to be traveling I will rip that DVD into a one disc XViD. So if I break it, who cares I'll just burn another one. And well someone isn't as apt to steal a blank CD-Rom as they would be for say, a DVD with a case and title on the disc.

It's plain to see just from visiting the links I posted above though that you are correct in saying that there will always be a time that someone comes around and completely bypasses or disables DRM. I know for a fact that my APEX DVD player has MacroVision and other BS taken off of it and it is also RCE (regionless) which means I can put any DVD I like into the player and it will play.

It's these sorts of things that make me wonder why all the effort for DRM is made, someone will truly crack it eventually. I still remember when DVD's were said to be uncrackable, and had some s

Hell, some people (no names :-) have been ripping DVDs to DVDR and CDR disks for ages using freely available shareware.

There are even some bloody excellent websites like VCDHelp.com and Doom9.net which explain the whole process in simple to follow steps and provide discussion forms for those who have questions or problems.

What's the MPAA going to do now? Force these sites to charge a subscription and demand that all the revenues be handed over to them?

Hey, maybe the MPAA *have* found a new business model -- let people help others make backup copies of your wares and then sue them for huge sums.

Probably sounds pretty damned good from a movie exec's perspective -- let others do all the work then just raid their wallets at your leisure.

This means that people who likes the film will buy a good quality film on DVD since there are only bad quality films around.