Howto Install dvd::rip and RIP our first DVD

Every Linux newbie is wondering is there a way to RIP his/her favourite DVD to a XVID or so. Of course, there is. Now second question is coming. How hard it is ? Is it hard at all ? How long is going to take ? The answer is really simple : "NO", there is a GUI tool called dvdrip, and we will show you how to install and work with it.

Let's start with the installation and a quick overview:

This is is a full featured DVD copy program written in Perl. It provides an easy to use but feature-rich Gtk+ GUI to control almost all aspects of the ripping and transcoding process. It uses the widely known video processing swissknife transcode and many other Open Source tools. dvd::rip itself is licensed under GPL / Perl Artistic License.

Installation :

NOTE: DVDRip available in the official three of many distributions :

Ubuntu/Debian : apt-get install <package>
Gentoo : emerge <package>
Sabayon : equo install <package>
ArchLinux : pacman <package>
and so on ... it depends on the distribution
if not let's download and install it :

1. Download

$ wget http://www.exit1.org/dvdrip/dist/dvdrip-0.98.10.tar.gz
This is the latest version by the time we created this article, if not ....

$ lynx http://www.exit1.org/dvdrip/doc/install.cipp#source_download
and select the latest tarball

2. Extract the archive

$ tar vfx dvdrip-0.98.10.tar.gz

3. Enter (use "cd") the directory

$ cd dvdrip-0.98.10

4. Configure and Install it ( the regular drill )

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/bin/dvdrip
The --prefix variable specifies the directory where the program is going to be installed

$ make && sudo make install

5. Launch the program
In case you have some dependencies missing like transcode (video stream processing tool) or ImageMagic (A collection of tools and libraries for many image formats) simply install them. They are available in every distribution official source three.

$ dvdrip
The GUI should start.
Now lets RIP our First DVD.
First Create a New Project ..

We called our "wedding", because we used a wedding DVD for the example. After you created the project go to "Rip Title" and select the titles you would like to RIP. We want to RIP the whole DVD that's why we selected both of them.

Then go to "Clip & Zoom" and adjust it to your needs.

Here's where you set all parameters regarding picture size and cropping. First get yourself a picture to work with: simply enter a frame number (like 200) into the Grab Preview Frame input line and press Grab Frame from ripped VOB. After a few seconds the three views below show the frame you requested. transcode uses three steps to bring the picture to its final size: first it clips the unscaled image, then it does resizing and last it clips again. Each of this steps can be left out by selecting 0 for clipping and the original width and height for resizing. Each window shows the result of those three steps. If you want to see how big the pictures really are then just click onto any of them and a pop-up window will be opened containing the result. You may have noticed the drop-down listbox below the three preview windows. dvd::rip offers a wide rage of presets for you to work with. Simply select one of those gives you a place to start. You can still change the values manually after selecting such a preset. All presets that are named "autoadjust..." try to guess the correct clipping regions. After selecting a preset hit the Apply Preset Values button. Now adjust the values you got until you're happy. The big frame, medium frame and small frame parts refer to the final image size that is to be achieved. big keeps almost full DVD resolution, medium is somewhere between 500 to 600 for the width and small is somewhere around 350. One note about resizing: Use fast resizing has a big impact upon image processing but requires that the target width and height are divisible by 32. Don't worry, dvd::rip will tell you if you can't use fast resizing. Note also that while it is possible to actually enlarge the picture I strongly advise against it. There are several drawbacks: the encoder needs a lot more bits to achieve the same quality you'd get when encoding a smaller picture and then scaling it up while playing it back, and you might even get distorted pictures (Peter Schuller reported such a case to me). Always scale down.
Now is time to choose the encoding parameters. Go to "Transcode" tab

We need to adjust our settings for the Video now. We can recommend "xvid" for output in the Video Options and "25" for Video Framerate and Keyframes "50". The next thing is "Video Bitrate calculation". Here you can specify how many parts are you going to need and what size they have to be in the "By Target Size" section. Strongly recommended is not to play with the other two sections if you are not an advanced user.
After that is the audio options, you have the choice of MP3 and AC3. It all depends on you. Keep in mind that MP3 will take less space, but AC3 will have surround support.
The last thing that you will need to adjust is "General Options".Most of the times you should let dvd::rip generate a small preview. You do that by providing a Frame Range. We usually take a 30 second sample which would be 750 frames at 25fp (<number of seconds> * <fps> = <number of frames to encode>) and start sometime into the movie (like 200, 300 frames). Good values might be 200 - 950. You should also give transcode a high nice level (which results in a low process priority) so it will only use spare time. If you really want your preview right here right now you can also temporarily disable DivX Multipass. Just remember to turn it back on later! When you're done click Transcode. After a couple of minutes at most your AVI/MPEG will be ready. Now have a look at it (like mplayer my-new-file.avi). This is a good moment to see if deinterlacing works as expected and to check if audio and video perfectly synchronized. If the Audio and Video are nt synchronized. f your audio and video are not synchronized in the preview (or when you play back the DVD itself) then you can give transcode a frame offset for the a/v synchronization. You do that by providing the parameter -D nr in the transcode options input line on the Transcodetab. The nr is the number of frames the audio is delayed. This number can be negative. A frame is 40msecs long at 25fps. In general the frame length is (1000 / fps)msecs long. For our wedding DVD I need a correction of -2 which amounts to -80msecs: -D -2. Now regenerate your preview video (the other parameters should still be the same) and check the audio again. If needed redo this step until you're satisfied.
When the preview is fine you can start your transcode. Make sure that DivX Multipass is turned on again if you disabled it for the preview. Either click on Transcode or on Transcode + Split if you want your files to be split automatically according to the settings under Video Bitrate Calculation.

NOTE: This is going to take a while, so if you have any questions refer to our FORUM

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