Can anybody recommend a DVD ripper that will rip modern DVDs?

July 24, 2010 9:09 PM

Can anybody recommend a DVD ripper that will rip modern DVDs for playback on a laptop? I used to use MactheRipper back in the day but the old free version (2.6.6 I think) won't work with modern DVDs. I was looking at MTR 4.0 but the whole forum and gift thing seems a little weird. (Can anybody vouch for MTR 4.0?) I tried Ripit and it failed on 3 DVD's (Ponyo, Samantha and Barbie & The Three Muskateers (It's for my kids)).

More info:

MBP 6,2.

I'm going on a trip with my kids and instead of bringing a bunch of DVDs I just want to rip them and then the kids can watch them on our laptop. Handbrake won't work because of CSS. I don't mind buying a DVD ripper. (sigh) It really shouldn't be this hard.

posted by crios to computers & internet (11 answers total)

Have you tried VLC? A how-to is here.
posted by leo. at 9:16 PM on July 24, 2010 [1 favorite]

Handbrake handles CSS just fine (using libdvdcss from VLC); it doesn't, however, handle all types of newer protection (or didn't the last time I messed around with libdvdcss).

I've been happy with MakeMKV on Windows, and I hope the Mac version will work well for you if you try to use it. Instead of re-encoding like Handbrake, MakeMKV will dump the video stream, your choice of audio streams, and your choice of subpicture streams to a Matroska (MKV) container for any number of titles on a disc. While you don't get the reduction in file size associated with transcoding using x264, it's fast and straightforward.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 9:18 PM on July 24, 2010

AnyDVD helps break those locks put on many newer DVDs.
posted by k8t at 9:30 PM on July 24, 2010

I've used MTR 4 and has worked on DVDs that MTR 2 and others have failed on (including Ponyo). I went through the whole "gifting" process which is pretty annoying and winds up being fairly expensive ($50 or more IIRC).

to copyright police: I'm in Canada where breaking DRM is legal for fair dealing purposes, at least for now
posted by Emanuel at 9:46 PM on July 24, 2010

Unfortunately, AnyDVD doesn't run on the Mac. It's Windows-only.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:20 PM on July 24, 2010

Welcome to the joys of ARccOS protection - hell, there's plenty of hardware players that don't handle it. Who would have thought that deliberately corrupting a disc's allocation table, creating recursive links, or pointing to errored / out of bounds sectors would cause problems?

I don't see too many ARccOS-protected disks, but the latest … ummm, "easily available" … versions of RipIt or ZippyRippy have worked for me in the past. It's a bit of a crapshoot as to which will work on any given disc, but so far at least one of them always has. The RipIt author seems fairly responsive to reports of problem discs, but you might as well start with ZippyRippy as it's free for the first few (10?) uses.

(And yeah, the whole MTR thing is 10 types of crazy. At this stage, it's pretty much only the remaining die-hard fanboys propping it up…)
posted by Pinback at 10:41 PM on July 24, 2010

Use Fairmount and copy the VIDEO_TS folder off the disc. You can open the resulting folder using the DVD Player app.
posted by Mwongozi at 6:24 AM on July 25, 2010

The way I've found to use Handbrake even with the DVDs that have deliberately confusing TOCs is to start the DVD and note the exact run time of the movie (click the elapsed time until it shows time remaining). Make a note of it, then scan in Handbrake and convert the file entry with the exact same time.

There will be some trial and error and some DVDs are very clever about blocking this (the decoy tracks are made up of actual movie bits but are in the very wrong order and will make watching the movie an exercise in the WTFism).

To date there's been one disk I've been unable to copy this way and it was a recent movie by Pixar.
posted by fenriq at 7:13 AM on July 25, 2010

I thought somebody pointed it out above, but it seems not: Fairmount won't help in these cases. Specifically, it can't handle anything beyond standard CSS encryption (because all it does is act as a shim, passing the encrypted data to the libraries used by VLC and presenting it as a dummy drive). It won't work on discs with ARccOS or similar types/levels of protection.

If Handbrake (uses VLC's libdvdcss), VLC (ditto), or MTR 2.66 (its own copy of libdvdcss, + early ARccOS work-arounds) won't work, then Fairmount definitely wont.

As fenriq suggests, if you're just interested in converting the movie to a video file then it's sometimes possible to work around some of the deliberately-errored discs of this type by trial-and-error - but that generally won't work when ripping to copy the DVD structure. For example, you'll still fall victim to the typical ARccOS trick of making the VIDEO_TS.IFO file appear to be 10x the size of the actual disc capacity…
posted by Pinback at 4:20 PM on July 25, 2010

MakeMKV so far has been getting the job done. It hasn't failed on a disk yet. Once I have the MKV I can either play it in VLC or use handbrake to produce a smaller file. Thanks all for the suggestions.
posted by crios at 6:08 AM on July 26, 2010

MTR fails for me occasionally. When it does, I use RipIt, which has always worked where MTR fails.
posted by tejolote at 8:19 PM on July 27, 2010