Monday, November 20, 2006

DVD Ripping

I wanted to rip a DVD to watch on my laptop later. I own the DVD. It's Season 1 of "The Tick". I decided to just rip one 22 minute episode to test Ubuntu with ripping. I end up using two different programs. One worked for me and one didn't.

The first was "DVD::RIP". It's interface was confusing and I had trouble finding the setting I wanted to change. I couldn't tell if I was ripping the whole DVD or just a single file. But hey, I'll try it. I changed the settings I needed then started the process. I got one frame in ten minutes and my DVD was locked. I had to reset the box to get the disc out. Well I figured that the DRM got me again so I got out one of my very early DVDs, "Dark City", and tried again. NOPE. Lockup, again. Ok, this is a new OS for me and maybe it was just the program I was using so I checked the built-in "Add/Remove Applications" and the very first app I saw was ACID RIP.

ACID RIP: It's interface was complex but understandable. Everything was there, I could pick my final format, bit rates and max file size. I put my DVD in and changed a few setting. I left most everything default except the output file type, I changed this to Xvid. This setting is under the Video Tab. The other settings here are LAVC, COPY, RAW, NUV, VFW, QTVIDEO, LIBDV, X264. Well I wanted something compatible with MS Windows too, so I chose the XVID becasue I had seen it on MS Windows and know it works. Once I made my changes I pressed the START button. The DVD spun, a status bar moved, the bit rate counter moved, the Frames Per Minute showed about 10 and the hard drive spun.

I could tell it was doing something! I looked at the ESTIMATED TIME TO COMPLETE and it said 52 minutes. hmm... 52 minutes for a 22 minute clip. That's well over what I'm use to. This is a 16X Lite-On DVD +/- Burner. On my MS laptop with a 8X burner, I could do a whole 2 hour DVD in 52 minutes! And don't tell me "your recoding it too" because my MS Laptop does that too and in under an hour. So at this rate a whole 2 hour DVD would take about 300 minutes? FIVE HOURS to rip a DVD (not counting burning time)? This is a 2.4ghz P4 with 512mbs ram and a 16X DVD. This is way too slow but I guess it worked.

BTW the Video did look good and is in a NON-DRM AVI format that I can watch where and when I want on whatever I choose. No pirating, no file sharing, just my DVD on my laptop without having to take my DVD with me.

ACID DVD: It ran slow for me but it worked.

NOTE: Turn off any screen savers, this will help some with the speed.

p.s. I took the background photo on Saturday, Nov 18, 2006, at Audra State Park, WV, but it could have been any wet pile of sand :-)

4 comments:

Enos Straitt said...

I do not do much media work so I am not sure if this is the norm. I know that many have complained that Linux DVD tools are not as good as Windows.

This only goes to show that Linux is not for every task yet. I did rip a CD once and it seemed to take longer than normal. I guess you could check to see if the program was ripping at the maximum speed of the DVD reader.

rycherox said...

A lot of media-savvy types migrate towards Apple's OS, so I've learned. A lot of how-to stuff for manuals and whatever cite their use of Macs.

Duck, good post. Great use of graphics to go along with it. Nicely detailed. Keep the blog up as much as possible. I'm sure a lot of people will get good use out of it. I referred to it when I tried throwing Ubuntu on the old Gateway Solo laptop. I might try again with another Linux version geared towards low-memory machines.

El Gee recommended a couple options I might try. I think there's an Ubuntu alternate release that might do the trick too.

Enos Straitt said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

What software do you use to rip your dvd's in windows?