DVD ripping with both menus and compression

March 26, 2008 8:50 AM

I need a way to rip DVDs to a hard drive whilst maintaining menu structure and picture quality, but also compressing the data. Something like the DVD-like features offered by DivX Author but with an automated front end to convert DVD menus to DivX menus

My flatmate is moving away to study film production for a year and would like to take as much of her DVD collection with her as possible without actually having to lug the disks along. We've been ripping the disks to a 500 gig USB drive using Mac The Ripper, but her collection is large and the drive is filling up fast.

Given how far video codecs have come since the initial release of DVDs, it seems like an awful waste of storage, but any tools I've found that rip DVDs to modern video codecs are only for converting the main feature. Given my flatmate's line of study, special features and directors commentary are a must-have.

She's got a Powerbook G4, so the resultant files must be playable on that. I have access to Ubuntu, Leopard and XP Pro, so the conversion tool can run on pretty much anything. Free would be nice, but anywhere up to $100 is probably acceptable.

Thanks in advance.

posted by leakymem to computers & internet (15 comments total)

Lifehacker was recommending DVD Shrink for this yesterday.
posted by MsMolly at 9:46 AM on March 26

I've used DVD shrink in the past for when I needed to burn the dvds to 4.3 gig disks, but going from an average of 7 gigs per disk to 4.3 isn't a huge improvement. Plus, because DVD shrink still outputs in DVD format, the compression it applies is causing more quality degradation than would occur with the same compression ratio using a more modern video codec.
posted by leakymem at 9:59 AM on March 26

On a Mac, you can use Handbrake to rip to H.264 (and AAC in an MP4 container or AC3/DTS in an MKV container). This will allow you to compress the image heavily while retaining transparency. It seems your "structure" concern goes less to retaining the disk layout than retaining all the content. You could conceivably rip both the main movie and additional program chains (preserving alternate audio as desired) to the same format and then navigate within the container using MP4 chapter files. Doom9 has an excellent MP4 FAQ with information about chapter files and metadata atoms.

Most DVDs compressed with DVD shrink tend to have barely noticeable quality degradation, in my experience. You could try decrypting them with DVD Decrypter, selecting only the streams you want to keep, and then compressing the resulting files to 4.3 gig disks, which would allow original audio and less compresses video streams. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to do this with Mac the Ripper, but between that and Handbrake (and maybe ffmpegx) your options are less limited than they may appear.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 10:13 AM on March 26

DVD Shrink does this but you're stuck with the MPEG2 compression of the DVD standard. It's dead simple to use and has made the most of MPEGE2, such as it is. But you're not going to get anything near divx storage efficiency out of it. Not without seriously damaging the quality of your video.
posted by scarabic at 10:16 AM on March 26

DVDShrink is good (and free!), but I've found that CloneDVD + AnyDVD works a lot better, but it's not free (although there is a 21-day free trial). Like DVDShrink, however, I don't believe they can use the DivX codec for compressing the video, so you're probably limited to its native compression (which seems to work fine for the backups I've made, even at compression rates up to 40-45%).

NB: As best as I can understand the relationship between the two, AnyDVD will remove the encryption from DVDs, while CloneDVD is what allows you to actually do the copying/ripping it to an ISO. You just have AnyDVD running in the background while you do the "heavy lifting" with CloneDVD.
posted by Doofus Magoo at 10:16 AM on March 26

Personally, I'd rip out the commentary / special features / main film - whatever you want and convert it all to a h.264 flavor (with one of the standard profiles so they play nice with hardware) with aac audio. It'll take longer, but they'll be smaller file sizes, look as good/better than xvid and be compatible with future devices (blu-ray, etc).
posted by i_am_a_Jedi at 11:19 AM on March 26

Try Fair Use Wizard. I haven't tried it myself, but it was recommended by Lifehacker a few weeks ago. (I think)
posted by negative1 at 1:48 PM on March 26

Try Fair Use Wizard. I haven't tried it myself, but it was recommended by Lifehacker a few weeks ago. (I think)

Fair Use Wizard is a shareware collection of several GPL apps with a dumbed-down GUI strapped on. AutoGK, Avidemux, Gordian Knot, meGUI, and AutoMKV can all do the same thing and more without a price tag or locked-down features.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 2:14 PM on March 26

How about ratDVD? I've never used it, so this is not a recommendation.
posted by Solomon at 2:34 PM on March 26

Inspector.Gadget, can handbrake encode multiple parallel audio streams into the one container? i.e. can I put the full picture, and also the picture with directors commentary, into the one file or do I have to encode a separate copy of the feature each time? If the former, great. I'm running a test-rip with it now and it seems to allow 2 audio tracks, though puzzling out if any of the available streams are actually commentary will probably have to wait until the rip is complete.

Solomon, thanks for the suggestion, but whatever about anything else, ratDVD is Windows only, which rules out my friend's Powerbook.
posted by leakymem at 4:50 PM on March 26

Handbrake should do dual audio. Be aware if you're muxing to MP4, you must use AAC or MP3 audio. MKV containers will allow multiple audio streams, including AC3 format. If you'd like to preserve the original audio, consider muxing to MKV and adding in director's commentary encoded to AAC in addition to regular audio left as is. Given that it is just speech, it isn't in surround anyway and can be greatly compressed to save space without affecting quality noticeably.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 5:11 PM on March 26

Ok, a test rip has shown that I can have multiple audio tracks. Which is nice. VLC can swap between them, but Quicktime seems confused by the fact that they're both called "English" and so it doesn't seem to want to swap.

That's the biggest hurdle overcome I guess. Dual audio does seem to be the limit though, which means films like Garden State which have multiple commentary tracks are still a pain, but thankfully, they are in the minority.

Thanks for your help.
posted by leakymem at 5:48 PM on March 26

Dual audio does seem to be the limit though, which means films like Garden State which have multiple commentary tracks are still a pain, but thankfully, they are in the minority.


Within the VIDEO_TS folder that Mac the Ripper dumps, you can find the biggest VOB (main movie) and use ffmpegX to convert the audio within to whichever format you would like (bearing in mind the container restrictions of your project) and then mux it into that file or (probably) just use VLC to dub in the additional audio once the original is muted. I'm not sure what the limit for audio streams is for an MP4 container (though my guess is it is well above two), but MKV has no practical limit on number of audio streams.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 6:02 PM on March 26

HandBrakeCLI allows for up to 8 audio streams, so that takes care of that! And it's also easier for me to re-rip my collection from the command line as I can just SSH back home while I'm at work and kick of the jobs. Excellent!
posted by leakymem at 6:33 PM on March 26

Excellent!

Glad to see you got it running so well.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 6:39 PM on March 26