For the Love of My Country

update - 13Dec09: Ignore the "percentage complete" shown in the taskbar - it seems to be broken, so when it displays aprox. 20% completed, the whole movie will in fact have been ripped...

You want to extract video from a DVD - I've always used this shoddy little program, DVD to AVI Converter which is shareware and only lets you rip 3 minutes at a time. However I've found another program which does a really good job, it's called DVDX. It's a free download with no strings attached. The GUI isn't all that flash, but essentially you don't need to worry too much about the input settings, take a look instead at the output settings. AVI with the XviD MPEG-4 Codec seems to be the best to rip to, as it gives a 640x360 resolution with good enough quality audio and video. The only real drawback is it takes ages - about an hour per DVD to back up. Still it results in a very compressed file, usually between 400mb - 800mb for a typical movie.

It will let you make output into chunks of your size preference, i.e. under 700mb if you wanted to burn to 2 CDs, but nobody cares about this these days. I accidently used this setting, resulting in two AVI files for one movie. Found this great free program, VirtualDub (which probably does a whole heap more stuff) - is very intuitive and lets you join AVI files together. Absolutely free - and here's a good quick tutorial for joining AVI files with VirtualDub so you don't stuff up first time round.

Labels: dvd, video