Ripping a DVD

[Rashkae]

Rick wrote:
> Okay, this would be my first attempt of Ripping a DVD
> to store the video on my computer.
> 
> First:
> What is the easiest program to use

Anydvd in Windows.. .sorry, there's just no 'easy' in Linux that I've
found.. lots of pitfalls no matter what you choose.

> 
> Second:
> Want to rip in a lossless format

DVD's are already MPEGS, which are lossy to begin with.  If you don't
want to loose anything further, then you need only extract the mpeg
stream exactly as is.  Lots of people suggest Vobcopy, which has lots of
great features, but will not work with some DVDs that have multi-angle
scenes.  (It's more common than you think.  I've seen several DVD's that
use multi-angle feature to display on screen text in different
languages, for example)

I use mplayer and -dumpstream option for most dvds.  My dvdrip script
looks like this:

mplayer dvd://$1 -dumpstream -dumpfile $1.vob

Then I need only specify what title I want to rip.  Most videos are
title 1, so I would type "dvdrip 1" to get it.

This will fail on DVD's protected by Sony's Arcoss copy protection
however.  For those, I've had good luck using vlc to rip them.  (I think
mplayer with dvdnav:// works as well, but haven't tested it)

> Third:
> Want to setup screen size to 1280 x 800 or close to that.

Sorry, DVD's are not HD video.  I suppose you can rescale the movie, but
since that would require re-encoding, and it's generally impossible to
create missing pixels out of thin air, you are likely to reduce quality
of your video, not improve it.  You're probably better off in most cases
to just play the video as is and let your video card scale the image to
size.