The Home Tech Place

Copying DVDs is one of those things that most Home Theater enthusiasts want to do.  You might want to copy your movies to a hard disk for any number of reasons.  Perhaps, you want to put them on your laptop or some kind of portable video device.  Another reason is that you might want all of your movies on a Network Attached Storage (NAS) that you can access from your couch without having to get up, find a DVD and put it in a player.  Perhaps you have children who literally can destroy a DVD in seconds if they get their grubby little fingers on it and you want to be able to play Barney does Dallas or whatever for your kids 100 zillion times without worrying about damaging the media.   Whatever the reason, sooner or later, you are going to be faced with the prospect of wanting to copy or rip a DVD to digital format.

Regular DVDs

I’m going to cover regular DVDs first and then deal with Blu-ray in a later post.  The nature of the Blu-ray technology presents some additional considerations which I’ll cover later.

The first thing that you need to decide is what format you wish to rip a DVD into.  To simplify our discussion, I’m going to break things down into two general groups; complete DVD rips and compressed movie files.  In the first case, the complete DVD rip, you are going to copy everything on the DVD to your hard drive.  This means that when you access the movie, it will for all intents and purposes behave as if you had inserted a physical DVD into your computer.  You will have access to the full DVD menu, original surround sound audio, alternate language tracks, director’s commentary, extras, etc.  You will even get the ads and previews that might play on the regular DVD.  The second option is to compress the DVD into a single file.  There are pros and cons to both approaches, so let’s look at each of them.

Dealing with Copy Protection

One of the things you will need to address before you use any of the software and techniques that I’m about to discuss is the matter of the CSS decryption.  None of the software programs that follow have CSS descrambling capability and will in fact pop up an error if you try to copy a disc that has been protected with CSS.  The solution is to use a program that handles the CSS decryption transparently on the fly so that the ripping or copy program only sees a clean unencrypted stream.  The best program that I have found for this is AnyDVD by Slysoft.  With AnyDVD loaded, you can use any ripping program of your choice and the program will think it is dealing with an unencrypted DVD.  AnyDVD really is the industry standard in this category and most discussions and articles around DVD ripping that I have seen reference this software.  The bad news is that it is the only software in this section that you actually have to purchase and it does not come cheap.  A license plus two years of updates will set you back nearly $70 US, but the price tends to fluctuate as it is denominated in Euros.  The updates are important because from time to time, disc producers make tweaks to the copy protection algorithm in a vain attempt to stay ahead of software like AnyDVD.  The folks over at Slysoft however are very good at what they do and as soon as a new variant of copy protection hits the streets, there is a new version of AnyDVD that cracks it.

If, down the road you want to add Blu-ray or the now defunct HD-DVD format ripping to your arsenal, then you’ll be looking at the AnyDVD HD product that runs about $112 US.  The nice thing is that you can always start with the basic AnyDVD program and upgrade to the HD version for a total price of about what it would have cost you to buy the HD product in the first place, so there’s no reason to spring for the HD version unless you have an immediate need to rip HD-DVD or Blu-ray titles.

Two things to keep in mind about Slysoft; one is that they let you download a fully functional copy and use it for 21 days before you have to register it, so you have ample time to ensure that it works for you.  Secondly, they seem to always be running a sale, particularly around most major U.S. holidays that will get you 20% or more off the price, so it may make sense to wait before you buy.

Full DVD Rips

The advantage to the full DVD rip is that you get everything that was on the original DVD.  A big plus here is that you get the full audio soundtrack encoded using whatever surround sound technology the DVD producer chose to offer (Dolby Digital, DTS, etc.).  You also have all of the extras that came with the original DVD including things like the Director’s commentary track and any kind of “behind the scenes” features that the DVD may offer.  Perhaps most importantly, since you have access to the full DVD menu, you have the ability to jump to specific scenes.  The big disadvantage to this is that there is no compression, so a movie ripped this way takes up a large amount of space on your drive.  Commercial DVDs are double layer and can hold a little over 7 GB of data.  This means that if you plan to build your library using full DVD rips, you are going to want a lot of hard disk space.  The most common use for this approach is people who want to fully archive their DVD collections on magnetic media and be able to choose the movie they want to watch from a menu rather than having to flip through their DVD collection.

So, how to do it?  Well, the simplest program that I have found is My Movies.  This is a program that was developed as a plug-in to Microsoft’s Windows Media Center Edition 2005.  Media Center 2005 was a special version of Windows XP that had the ability to (among other things) record television and came equipped with a so-called 10 foot interface, meaning that it could be navigated from 10 feet away (your couch for example) with a remote rather than a keyboard and mouse.  My Movies was intended to be installed on the Media Center PC and would allow you to not only rip complete DVDs, but it also featured a database to store details about the movies and a plug-in for Windows Media Center that let you browse your movie collection by its box art.

With the advent of Vista and later Windows 7, Microsoft built the Media Center capability into regular versions of Windows.  Media Center is available on Vista in the Home Premium and Ultimate Editions, and is available in Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate Editions.  These later versions of Media Center did not require the special My Movies Plug in to browse your movie collection as they had their own menu item for movies specifically.

If you don’t care about the background information that My Movies normally stores about each movie, you can just install it on a workstation, rip the movies, and copy them to your NAS.  You then can point your Media Center PC at the movie share on the NAS and browse your collection.  The My Movies application is simple to install and use and runs on both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Windows.  Once installed, you simply pop a DVD into your computer, run the My Movies application and it will ask you if you want to copy to DVD.

One note here – there are actually two different formats into which you can rip a DVD; File System & ISO.  The File system essentially duplicates the file system on the DVD into a folder with the same name.  The ISO option rips the entire DVD into a single ISO file.

There are pros and cons to both approaches.  The ISO version is handy if you think you might someday want to burn a physical DVD of the movie.  You will need a Double Layer DVD drive and media, since most commercial movies are larger than the 4.7 GB that standard DVDs top out at but otherwise you should be all set as most current burning applications can write any ISO as long as the destination DVD-ROM has enough space.  If you have no interest in being able to burn movies back to DVD and just want to play back the digital version, the ISO format is probably not the best choice as playback can be a bit tricky.  Since your computer can’t directly access the inside of an ISO file, you will need a program that mounts the ISO image.  This will create a virtual DVD drive on your computer and your DVD player application will see it as simply another physical DVD.  An ISO mounting application is available for free from Slysoft, the makers of the AnyDVD program.  I’ll cover the specifics of this in the Blu-ray section as my recommendation will be to use ISO format for those types of disks.

For regular DVDs, I recommend using the File System option.  Most DVD player applications can directly load and play back a movie in the File System format.  A second consideration is that Hardware players that I have tested generally work well with File System based rips, but can have problems with ISO ones.

Compressed Movie Files

The second alternative is to compress a DVD into a single file.  This has several advantages.  First of all, there is a wide variety of formats that you can use to compress the movies, so it is possible to create a movie file for playback on just about any device imaginable (iPod, Zune, PSP, Xbox 360, etc.) .  The size of the movie file is entirely up to you – all you have to decide is the degree of tradeoff between quality and storage space required.  The smaller the file, the lower the quality, but if you are going to be playing it back on, say, an iPhone, you are dealing with a small screen, so a highly compressed file is not going to be that much of a problem.  I generally choose a format that represents a good balance between size and quality.  In my testing, I have found that a standard feature length film (approx. 2 hours or so) compressed down to about 1.3 GB of space yields an acceptable enough image to be played back on a 46” LCD TV without a serious hit to the quality of the video.

There are several key disadvantages to compressing a movie file versus performing a full DVD rip. First of all, you are making a tradeoff between storage space and quality.  Not only will the video quality be lower, but you are likely to have to give up the advanced audio encoding (Dolby Digital, etc.) of a full DVD rip.  Secondly, since you are essentially re-encoding your video, you are going to need a fairly powerful computer.  It is not uncommon for a moderately powerful computer to take an hour or more to copy a DVD into a compressed format.  If your computer is underpowered, it could take considerably more time.  Third, there are a number of different formats you can encode into, not all of which work with all video players.  If, you know for example, that you will only ever want to play your video files on your Zune, then, you can use a Zune friendly format.  If, however you later decide to switch to an iPhone, you may find that your chosen file format is not compatible with the iPhone and you will not be able to watch any of your older movies anymore.

Assuming you wish to proceed with creating a compressed movie file, your first decision is which video codec to use.  One of the earlier codecs that is still fairly popular is the Divx format.  Divx has been around for a fairly long time and is a fairly stable codec.  The company makes player software for both Windows and Macs freely available.  On the other hand, some standalone players won’t play Divx.  One such example was the Xbox360.  For the first couple of years or so after the Xbox 360 was released, it did not support Divx.  While most players will likely be able to handle Divx files, it pays to check before you go down that road.  One other issue is that the Divx folks are forever revising their codec.  The current version is 7.0, but there are still players out there that can’t handle anything newer than Divx version 5, so using Divx will require some thinking as to which version of the codec to use. In addition to Divx, which is commercial software, there is also an open source version called Xvid.  The two are somewhat interchangeable in that the latest version of the Divx player should be able to play any Xvid-encoded file, but the reverse is not necessarily the case.  Divx continues to evolve their codec and Xvid does not always keep up.  Early on, I worked with Divx, but now recommend the more industry standard h.264 codec for video encoding.

The basic h.264 codec is widely supported not only by operating systems but also by many devices.  Zunes, Xbox 360s, and Apple iPhone/iPods all offer native h.264 support.   You can encode a movie file in h.264 and can play it back on pretty much any device that you own or could contemplate purchasing in the future.  In the past, I experimented with Recode by Nero.  Recode is included in Nero’s suite of burning and ripping apps.  I really liked version 7 of the software.  I could install it as much as I liked which was handy since I rebuilt my computers on a fairly regular basis.  Newer versions of Nero unfortunately became increasingly large, unwieldy, and worse, added onerous copy protection.  Starting with version 8, you had to activate the software and there was no way to de-activate it so you could move it to a new machine.  If I rebuilt my computer, I got a warning that my serial number had been previously used.  To Nero’s credit, it let me continue after warning me that I could not have it installed in more than one place at a time, but it left me wondering how many reinstalls I would get before it locked me out.  Suffice to say, the copy protection was the final nail in Nero’s coffin as far as I was concerned.

My search for an alternative took me to Handbrake, an application that had begun as a DVD ripper for the Mac, but later moved to Windows.  Handbrake is drop dead simple to use.  Once installed (and it too works on both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Windows) all you need to do is to point it at the source DVD, tell it where to store the encoded file, choose a format from a list of presets, and let it rip so to speak.  I recommend the Normal preset under the Regular heading for ripping.  I have found that this preset creates an h.264 file that can be played on pretty much any device that I have seen.  Granted, if all you use are Apple products, one of the Apple specific presets might be more appropriate, but you run the risk that the file you create might not be playable on non-Apple software or hardware.  In addition to the Normal preset, there is also an option for High Profile; however all that this appears to do is to add an additional AC3 Dolby Digital soundtrack to the movie.  Since many playback devices don’t know how to handle the AC3 track anyway, you run the risk of including something that only bloats your file size and may also not be compatible with some playback technologies. The main disadvantage of the Handbrake presets is that they do not give you quite the same level of control in terms of the tradeoff between file size and video quality as Nero did.  Nero offered a slider that let you choose the bitrate you wanted to encode the video to; higher bandwidth meant larger files and vice versa.  On the flip side, the Normal preset seems to do a reasonable job and produces a reasonable size, so it’s probably not something to really sweat.  If you are a hard core videophile and know what all of the various encoding settings do, Handbrake will allow you to tweak things to your heart’s content, but it is not particularly user friendly in this mode and assumes a fair amount of knowledge of the video encoding process, so for most casual users, the presets will be the way to go.

Tags: Rip DVD, Ripping DVD