Rip Clips from DVDs

January 14, 2004 7:55 AM

Software Question - I am trying to find a freeware or shareware program that can rip from a DVD. Not necessarily an entire DVD, small 2-3 minutes clips from particular chapters. Preferably a program that can convert to .mpg or quicktime clip. Clips will be available for download for reference purposes for a limited time. So I guess this program would should also be able to compress converted files to smaller sizes. Any clue?
posted by turbanhead to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Might check out Videolan. It was originally developed for streaming video across a lan, but lately it's been touted as the best free DVD player avaliable. It also does video output (I believe) and may work for your needs.
posted by daver at 9:27 AM on January 14, 2004

Not sure if this is what you are looking for, but I have used DVD To Pocket PC to rip & compress movies from DVD to put them on my PDA. The program doesn't really have anything to do with Pocket PC, it just rips and encodes the video in MS .wmv format. It compresses it a fair amount (so that about 100 minutes will fit on a 128 MB flash memory card), but a slightly higher quality option is also available.
posted by mfbridges at 10:34 AM on January 14, 2004

I don't know what platform you are looking to do this on,
but I believe MediaPipe meets your requirements.
It has a bit of a learning curve to get everything in the right order,
but once you do it's dead simple.
posted by milovoo at 10:50 AM on January 14, 2004

See Doom9 for information and free tools for all of your DVD backup, ripping, and encoding needs. In particular, check out the Gordian Knot and AutoGK (a simplified, less configurable version of GK) guides
posted by ecrivain at 11:13 AM on January 14, 2004

dvdrhelp.com is the most comprehensive index of tools and guides you will find. There's a LOT of information there, but their organization and search are decent.

I think your main problem with ripping just a tiny part of a DVD disc would be if you wanted to preview chapters on the fly or something fancy like that.

SmartRipper is an excellent Windows DVD ripping program which will allow you to rip wholesale, one VOB file at a time, or by program angle and/or chapter. But it helps a lot to know which chapter you want, since the process does not offer an on-the-fly preview. I have yet to find a program that makes ripping quite that easy.

Once you're done ripping, use DVD2AVI for frameserving and TMPGenc for encoding in mpg.

This may sound like mumbo jumbo, but here is an excellent step by step guide to using these free tools in this way. Standard disclaimer: don't steal anything, pay your taxes, call your mother on May 11, and don't masturbate. It kills kittens.

Of course, if you are looking to do this in MacOS, you're going to have less selection of tools, but DVDRhelp.com should provide you some info. Here's their list of Mac tools.
posted by scarabic at 9:11 PM on January 14, 2004

You could also check out DVD Decrypter.
posted by Blue Stone at 2:49 AM on January 15, 2004