Decent DVD-Ripping Solution For Linux? 501
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."
If all else fails... (Score:4, Interesting)
Acid Rip (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Command Line Solution (Score:5, Interesting)
mkisofs -dvd-video -udf -o desired_iso_name.iso
Done.
Problems finding OSS Lossless DVD ISO ripper (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, most encoders (the people, not the programs) out there seem to be idiots. Most of the time, you still get XviD with MP3, in a AVI container. No chapters, problems with the aspect ratio (because many encoders cut off some pixels on the border, for optimization reasons), and most of all, a totally shitty quality.
Nowadays, I expect my videos to be in this format:
- 700-1400 MB size
- Matroska container
- H.264 encoded video
- AC3 5.1 Dolby Digital or better audio
- no visible quality difference from the original DVD, even for experts
- includes chapters and other metadata.
If possible, there should also be
- Two audio streams. one in my language, one in the original language
- Subtitles for the original language included in the container.
- Cover and infos included in the metadata.
If the original medium exists in a HD format, I want that quality too (of course with a bigger file size).
No reason to own a home cinema, when you watch YouTube videos on it. ^^
Re:Use Handbrake (Score:3, Interesting)
I will second this. I used this to encode all of my Kid DVDs so that the original copies are never ruined. My movies too, but for reasons of convenience rather than worries about damage. Combine this with a Popcorn Hour(my choice), MythTV, etc and you have your entire movie library at your fingertips.
Re:Why bother? (Score:3, Interesting)
Encoding yourself is dangerous. What if you forget the key?
Seriously, H.264 may not be ideal for personal use, but it rocks if you're actually doing video production for online distribution, and there are USB dongles you can get that will encode faster than realtime without using up all your CPU.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
What about The Teaching Company DVDs? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:DVDFab (Score:2, Interesting)
DVDFab is a newer DVDDecrypter with more features.
Re:DVDFab (Score:3, Interesting)
There are a lot of new Linux users who are comfortable enough with Ubuntu, and even dicking around in bash, but who are not comfortable compiling stuff from source because it's not immediately clear how you go about removing, upgrading, etc. without the package manager. Yum and Apt are a hell of a crutch.
Right now I'm in dep hell on a CENTOS box because there is no slick way to install php 5.2 from any of the repos. So I know I will have to track down all the dependencies myself (two of the seven have their own deps...le sigh) which I'm just dreading. And then what happens when I need a new version of PHP? I have to jump through these hoops again?
Re:DVDFab (Score:4, Interesting)
QT doesn't need a whole bunch of wrappers and libraries to fake a windows environment, DVDFab does. End of story.
You are comparing things on two different levels of abstraction here. QT is a set of libraries that provides a certain API on which applications are built. WINE is a set of libraries that provides a different API on which some other applications are built. KDE requires the QT APIs in the same fashion that DVDFab requires the WIN32 APIS. There is no principled difference between running an application that's NIX-QT-KDE and one that's NIX-WIN32-DVDFab.
You wouldn't say that QT creates a "fake" QT environment for applications like KDE so why would you say that WINE provides a "fake" WIN32 environment for DVDFab? The application doesn't care what's underneath the API that it sees, it only wants function calls to result in the documented behavior and is agnostic about the rest. I write multi-platform OpenGL and OpenSSL code, when I call SSL_check_private_key(ssl_ptr) or gluNewQuadric() , I don't care what lower-level function is called. In fact, I'm quite happy that some kind soul has decided to hide as much of that as possible from me so I can focus on getting my actual work done.
TL;DR version: It would be a wonderful world if all the OSs have compatibility layers for all the APIs (JVM/JNI, Mono/CLR, GTK, QT, WIN32, Carbon, Cocoa ...) so the application devs would write in whatever they want and computer users could run in whatever they want -- because that's what computers are for: not doing "computer stuff" but using computers to accomplish things.
PS: Saying end of story does not, contrary to popular belief, actually mean that it's the end of the story. In fact, most of the time it signals that the writer has decided that she doesn't need to logically justify her statements and is a good idea to subject them to more scrutiny.
cp? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?