DVD Ripping

[Mannlich]

I recently purchased two 1TB Hard Drives for external use. I want to backup my DVD collection to them. I am looking for some input on DVD Ripping software to use. I have tried a few products -- Xilisoft DVD Ripper, Magic DVD Ripper, etc. and always end up with the same result -- A 16:9 movie contained in a 4:3 video box. When using media player classic, I then need to stretch the image out in order to make it fit correctly.

I obviously don't know a whole lot about video encoding. I'd like to be able to rip a DVD to a DivX file that is about 1GB in size with pretty good quality. I was hoping to get some feedback on what software I should be using and what settings I should be manipulating within that software. I appreciate any help.

[t_r_nelson]

I'd like to start doing this, too. Please help us both with some suggestions.

[IceBreakerG]

I do this quite a bit. But I use 2 programs to do it. I use DVD Decryptor and TMPGEnc v4.0. You can use DVD Decryptor to rip the movie into 1 VOB file (in the settings, in IFO mode, you need to set the file splitting to none). Then load the file in TMPGEnc and encode it to whatever format you want (divx, wmv, h.264, etc). I rip a lot of TV show DVDs because I'd rather have it on my hard drive than on a disc.

[sn00pie]

DVD Shrink and DVDFab HD Decryptor, or Handbrake if your on a Mac ;)

[Jarik]

http://www.dvdflick.net/

http://www.minidvdsoft.com/dvdcreator/

[Eric Veteran]

I use AnyDVD to rip my movies and usually just encode them with Dr. DivX.

[Donkey88]

My combination of choice is DVD Decrypter and AutoGK to then encode them into XviD movies. (It also lets you use DivX if you install it) As for settings, I use 720x576 for the resolution, as I think thats the resolution it's stored at in the first place.

[IceBreakerG]

A resolution of 720x576 is for PAL DVDs as NTSC would be 720x480. For most widescreen videos I've seen on DVD, the resolution is usually 720x400 or something very close to that (within 20px or so). For standard resolution videos, the resolution is usually around 640x480 (again, with like a 20px margin of error depending on the video).

[LiqHead]

AnyDVD & CloneDVD :yes:

[Jason S. Global Moderator]

DVDFab HD Decrypter (Y) simple copy to hard drive while removing protection. nothing to it.

[Mannlich]

Thanks for all of the responses, I appreciate the help.

[Appzalien]

There are a few converters I have used that endup looking like a 4x3 video even though I set them to widescreen. What I found was they were making a setting in the ifo file as Pan&Scan which then made the video appear as 4x3 (lost sides of the picture) on a regular format TV. Using a program called ifoedit I was able to access the ifo's before burning the disk and remove the check mark for pan&scan, and then the videos appeared as normal widscreen (black bars top and bottom) on a regualar TV set. If my TV had been a widescreen I would never have known and disks I lent to friends with regular TV's would look incorrect.

[Al-Mann]

DVDFab HD Decrypter (Y) simple copy to hard drive while removing protection. nothing to it.

I have been using DVD Fab HD Decrypter (since DVD Decrypter and DVD Shrink have problems with newer DVDs) but still not able to get around the funky chapter order that most current DVDs have... Trying to convert DVDs for use on my PSP...

[kilimanjaro]

DVD Shrink and DVDFab HD Decryptor, or Handbrake if your on a Mac ;)

(Y)

Another vote for this combo. I haven't encountered any problems with this combo.

Handbrake is all sorts of awesome....I use it to rip DVDs to play on my Nokia E71.

EDIT; I use the windows version of handbrake.