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Decent DVD-Ripping Solution For Linux?
supersloshy writes "I'm a user of Ubuntu Linux and I have been for a little while now. Recently I've been trying to copy DVDs onto a portable media player, but everything I've tried isn't working right. dvd::rip always gets the language mixed up (for example, when ripping 'Howl's Moving Castle,' one of the files it ripped to was in Japanese instead of English), Acidrip just plain isn't working for me (not recognizing a disc with spaces in its name, refusing to encode, etc.), Thoggen is having trouble with chapters (chapter 1 repeated twice for me once), and OGMRip has the audio out of sync. What I'm looking for is a reliable program to copy the movie into a single file with none of the audio or video glitches as mentioned above. Is there even such thing on Linux? If you can't think of a decent Linux-based solution, then a Windows one is fine as long as it works."
Try running DVDFab under WINE.
Just this morning, Lifehacker posted about this very topic: http://lifehacker.com/5205221/acidrip-for-linux-rips-dvds-with-two+click-ease
You won't find one better than Handbrake, works great for me. Here's a howto I wrote on the topic: http://spareclockcycles.wordpress.com/2008/12/11/handbrake-for-dvd-ripping-on-ubuntu/
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=handbrake
Live it, learn it, love it.
http://handbrake.fr/
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
http://handbrake.fr/
I use it on my Mac and it produces pretty decent encodes, even with the presets.
I find Handbrake works excellently under OSX, and, seeing as it has a Linux/GUI version, it may be worth trying out.
http://handbrake.fr
Mencoder (mplayer package) works pretty well.
Following the docs gave me decent quality rips without too much hassle.
http://web.njit.edu/all_topics/Prog_Lang_Docs/html/mplayer/encoding.html
According to the summary Thoggen is having issues with the chapters on his discs.
BitTorrent. Its probably faster and definitely easier.
Through much trial and error I've found that k9copy is the most reliable and functional program for ripping DVDs. You can customize what you want or don't want and it puts everything into VOB that can easily be burned as a video dvd in k3b. Happy Burning! :)
MakeMKV. No loss in quality (think Ogg). Simple, easy and high quality. Hope you have a big hard drive.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
dvd::rip always gets the language mixed up (for example, when ripping 'Howl's Moving Castle,' one of the files it ripped to was in Japanese instead of English),
What makes you think it is dvd::rip that has the language mixed up? It is a Japanese movie and it is not surprising that the first audio track is Japanese. Fortunately you can select to rip a different audio track.
Acidrip just plain isn't working for me (not recognizing a disc with spaces in its name, refusing to encode, etc.)
I am betting you set it up wrong, since the disc name really shouldn't effect anything. It could be your ripper program should point at /dev/dvd (or equivalent), not "/mnt/Mounted File System"
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
If all else fails you could just WINE DVD Shrink. It works like a charm.
Give AcidRip another try. I have yet to encounter a DVD it couldn't rip. More accurately, I have yet to encounter a DVD that mencoder, the encoding program behind most (all?) of the DVD rippers on Linux, couldn't rip. For some DVD's, it may appear as if AcidRip has malfunctioned, as the entire system can become unresponsive or very jerky for long periods of time, and the system log will fill with sector error messages.
If you check the size of the video file, however, you will notice that it is slowly growing. This is mencoder making its way through the access restrictions on the disk, but encountering a lot of resistance. It is succeeding, though. For these disks, I let AcidRip run overnight.
Run the movie through DVDShrink via wine (works flawlessly) in Reauthor Mode, selecting the main movie + just the audio track you want (i grab the 5.0 audio for simplicity, then encode at No Compression, and rip to files on the hard drive. When you have the video_ts folder on your hard drive, run it through Acidrip at will. You can of course correct the folder name so there's no issues with acidrip loading the (now) unencrypted) files. I use this process to encode all my movies to xvid .avi format, so they can easily be streamed to my XBMC box via a samba share and viewed on the living room TV.
Need more useless stuff to read on teh internetz?
vobcopy -i /folder/to/copy/to -m [executed where the dvd is mounted]
/directory/to/put/iso
mkisofs -dvd-video -udf -o desired_iso_name.iso
Done.
All of the Linux solutions I have seen encode to another format. Because of lack of alternatives for ripping encrypted DVDs, my solution for years has been Windows DVD Decrypter. I just need an equivalent of DD for encrypted disks but searching only comes up with programs that re-encode. I would love to not power-on my Windows laptop for this.
I prefer lossless iso rips for several reasons. Disk space is cheap these days so why not go with lossless. ISO files work in a greater variety of players and can be burned if need be. ISO is the only format that works with Apple DVD player on my Mac Mini.
Flexibility. Matroska is wildly popular in anime fansubbing because you can have an arbitrary number of audio tracks (english, japanese, Dolby surround, all the commentary tracks) and subtitles (including multiple versions with toggle-able onscreen translation of text). With the benefits that Matroska provides, it annoys me that people use anything else. You can literally put anything into a matroska container. It surprises me that people haven't found more ways to put malware in them.
Most of the time, you still get XviD with MP3, in a AVI container.
To be clear, "Xvid" is an encoder (like DivX) and it makes MPEG4 ASP video streams. Calling a file an "Xvid" file is like calling a photocopy a "Xerox". It might have been created with a genuine Xerox machine but just looking at the paper, you wouldn't know or care.
MKV is still the bleeding edge. The reason AVI/ASP/MP3 is popular is because over 100 million DivX certified devices can play those files. DivX DVD players start around $30 at Wal-mart and are by far the cheapest way to move video from your computer to your living room.
There are also "DivX Ultra" devices that play AVI/ASP/AC3 with chapters, interactive menus, multiple audio and multiple subtitles. Other than the ASP codec, DivX Plus offers most of what you want.
Just recently "DivX Plus" was launched which is MKV/H.264/AAC/AC3. Some day DivX Plus devices might also cost $30 but for now MKV is only useful for people with a PC connected to their TV. Sure it has a lot of advantages over AVI/ASP/MP3 but broad compatibility trumps minor improvements in compression ratios.
The Matroska Multimedia Container is an open standard free container format, a file format that can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture or subtitle tracks inside a single file.[1] It is intended to serve as a universal format for storing common multimedia content, like movies or TV shows. Matroska is similar in conception to other containers like AVI, MP4 or ASF, but is entirely open in specification, with implementations consisting mostly of open source software.
First of all, Matroska is an open spec, and most implementations (including the reference implementation, libmatroska) are Open Source (lgpl for libmatroska).
Mkv supports B-frames, Variable bit rate audio, Variable frame rate, Chapters, and Subtitles. Not all containers support all of these, and AVI only supports any of those with workarounds, modifications or just nasty hacks.
The mpeg container can't do chapters or subtitles, and obviously only holds media in the mpeg (1 or 2) format.
MP4 has limited chapter and subtitle support and only deals with mpeg media (basically 1, 2, and 4 ASP/AVC).
Ogg/ogm is designed for simplicity, streaming and specifically for Vorbis and Theora (although most/all other codecs can be used), while Mkv is meant as a completely general-purpose distribution container, and wants to replace avi, asf, mp4, mov, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matroska
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_container_formats
http://www.matroska.org/technical/guides/faq/index.html
http://xiph.org/container/
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t10426.html
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
We have almost 100 DVDs purchased from The Teaching Company (courses in astronomy, geology, math, physics, etc.)
So far, we have no tool for easily ripping them onto our LAN server (sorry, no P2P). I have tried acidrip, dvd::rip, handbrake, thoggen, and VLC's convert function. None of them can rip these DVDs properly, but we can rip any other DVD we have with any of these tools.
With a DVD from TTC, all of them just see one title with a length of 43 seconds - the FBI warning. The DVDs play fine in VLC or any other player, but the structure information (IFO file?) is deliberately corrupt or obfuscated, on every single TTC DVD!
If I use chapter mode in dvd::rip or handbrake, or use convert mode in VLC, then individual "chapters" can be ripped, one at a time. Unfortunately, the chapter structure also appears to be obfuscated. Chapters in the table of contents according to handbrake or dvd::rip vary from a few seconds to 15 minutes in length, whereas the actual chapters/lessons when played are all about 25 minutes. Moreover, to assemble the chapters/lessons as viewed, from the individual "chapters" as ripped, one must combine them in a nearly random non-numerical-sequence order, and often split a ripped "chapter" between two actual chapters/lessons. It's labour-intensive and very annoying, since what we're trying to do is a legitimate fair-use (format shift for play on PCs, DVDs then left on shelf).
Does anyone have a ripping solution which works easily on DVDs from The Teaching Company, or on other DVDs with an obfuscated table of contents?
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
The problem with Disney is they screw up the discs so it looks like there's ~100 titles, all with close to the correct running time.
I've used that technique with our Disney DVDs, and it works fine.
The Teaching Company seems to take the opposite approach. They have only one title which contains the FBI warning, 43 seconds long. That's it, there are no other titles listed. There are many chapters listed in the structure, but not contained in any title, and with bizarre lengths. They are also in random numerical sequence and don't correspond to the chapters/lessons as viewed.
I'd really like to find a solution which reads the DVD structure the same way it is read while being played - i.e. using the information in the stream and/or menus, not just the structure as given in the table of contents. All of these DVDs play fine in VLC or mplayer or anything else, just the contents information is obfuscated making them near-impossible to rip.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Available in a linux flavor, I ripped 462 movies for my private use (streaming from my 1tb hdd to an apple tv) from DVD last fall. At the time Handbrake used its own decoder which didn't always work for certain types of highly standard breaking locking schemes (read: broken dvd's). However the recent version, at least for my mac, has no troubles as it is using VLC player for the dvd decoding engine.
I found the best success using constant quality, around 59% plus a bunch of other handy settings I found under the "best settings and why" section in the forums for handbrake.
I strongly recommend this avenue as the results are magnificent AVC encodes in iTunes, iPod, iPhone, PS3, etc. compatible container and they are literally indistinguishable from their DVD counterpart (save a few exceptionally difficult to rip movies like Pi). Good software, and free too.
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
Taking a likely -1 Offtopic mod for violating "Do not feed the trolls"... ...But I have to speak on this.
Companies that want to be commercial dickheads and force you to pay for content you already own are at fault here, not linux.
First we have the patent holders on the codecs. They get royalties, both from the media stampers that produce the media, as well as the companies that make the hardware that plays said media. You pay for both of these, on top of the part of the sales $$$ that actually goes to the companies that create the content. A classic case of rent seeking, let alone how much the actual creative people themselves are getting screwed over and are effectively sharecroppers using the company roster as a field.
Then we have the content producers themselves. By making outlandish EULA's and enforcing abusive DRM, they force you to buy the same material multiple times if you want to move it around between formats. That's what DRM does, it makes it a pain in the ass to do anything but bend over and pay $$$ for multiple copies of the same stuff, just in different formats. Yet more rent seeking.
Linux, by being FOSS, is shut out in the cold because it doesn't dirty itself with such stupid palm-greasing fiddle faddle.
Unfortunately, if you're a saint in a corrupt world, you will be left out of lots of stuff if you aren't willing to play dirty.
So rant and rave all you like, but don't blame linux. It's just an innocent bystander in the civil war that is corporate america.
Personally, I'm glad linux isn't getting involved in it.
What nobody will tell you is that to prevent some older, free ripping tools from working, some studios (mostly for DVDs released in region 1 - USA and Canada - but also sometimes seen elsewhere) use a copy protection method called ARCCOS or something similar to protect their DVDs. The only rippers I know of that can defeat this are DVDFab HD Decrypter (they have a free version available) and AnyDVD (don't know if there is a free version or only the commercial version). Both are updated regularly to deal with new variations in ARCCOS. ARCCOS uses deliberately placed bad sectors on the disc to thwart copying. It's quite complicated, but it relies on a difference between how standalone DVD players and PCs read discs to thwart copying attempts. DVDFab and AnyDVD get updated because they are produced in countries that are currently free from MPAA enslavement. I am unaware of any programs other than those that can correctly rip DVDs and those only work on Windows. I don't keep up with Handbrake as it's mostly for Mac fanboys (but they do have a Windows version), so I have no idea if Handbrake is actually able to deal with ARCCOS or not. The people I know who use it do not rip DVDs that I know to use ARCCOS, so I have no idea if Handbrake can even deal with ARCCOS correctly or not.
I don't understand why people want to "rip" with anything more complex than "cp /dev/cdrom GoneWithTheWind.iso". When you play back the file, you get the exact same quality and options as on the DVD. Other than choosing a filename, it is zero-click. What am I missing?