I am constantly looking for ways to rip DVDs that I own. So I was very excited to find this article on Lifehacker.com.
First a disclaimer, it is probably illegal to make copies of DVDs that have any kind of copy protection devices on them. All the DVDs I copy do not contain said devices.
My daughter is 3 years old and has an uncanny knack at opening DVD cases, removing the DVD and putting it in the player. Needless to say this wrecks havoc on our DVDs, grubby fingers and scratched discs. So I copy the DVD to a blank DVD-R and put the originals in a safe place.
I was surprised to learn that VLC is not just an amazing media player but can also rip DVDs into a variety of formats. Plus, since it plays the DVD to encode it, VLC can bypass any security devices on the disc. That being said I do not endorse using such methods to make illegal copies of DVD.
There are other great programs to do the same thing, example: Handbrake, however I already use VLC so now I don’t have to install yet another program on my computer.
The only “hard” part if finding which Title is the actual movie. You have to go through the titles one by one till you find it. Outside that it is very easy to use VLC to encode DVDs. On my next few runs I’m going to try to increase the Birates on audio and video. My first few movies got a little wonky on full screen. I used the settings in the Lifehacker article and got a file size of about 550MB for an hour and a half movie.
By the way, I do everything a little weird. I rip the DVD to an MP4 format then I use DVD Flick to burn it back to a DVD-R. Why? Well I don’t have enough storage to store 4+ Gigs of video for each DVD. The MP4 is less that 1GB usually and DVD Flick does a great job of putting it back in DVD format. So when my daughter destroys the DVD-R I made I can easily burn another and yet don’t have to have a lot of storage to store my DVD collection.
Once I get the whole method down to a science I’ll write a tutorial that uses VLC and DVD Flick. Did I mention all of the software mentioned is free? Well it is.
Links
http://www.videolan.org/
http://lifehacker.com/397573/master-your-digital-media-with-vlc
http://www.dvdflick.net/
http://handbrake.fr/
