Ripping DVD movies to CDR

[thekingofpain]

For "archival purposes" of your own software of course, Smartripper allows you to copy dvd to cdr by creating a large avi file which you can then play on your non dvd machines, it sidesteps the copyprotect at the same time, pretty cool!!! http://www.digital-digest.com/dvd/downloads/smart-ripper.html

[canit]

tkop have you tried it? Do you know if it keeps the multi-channel soundtracks intact(DD,DTS)? Err, yes I do create my own homemade multi-channel movies in the studio out back.

[flash4master]

how good is the quality of the finished product?

[Szech]

I have been doing this for a while now, after my roommate lost my Windows 98 CD, my Word 2000 CD, and the second disc of Visual Studio (I know, I need to find a new place, I'm working on it).

flash4master, The movies have really good quality, despite low bitrates.

canit, it does preserve the 5-channel dolby digital soundtrack, but since my soundcard only has two-channel out, I usually just do stereo.

I must say, however, that encoding takes a long time. About 10 hours for a full movie on my Celeron 566@850.

[jpeppers]

How do you convert the VOB files to mpeg?

[SithLord075]

I think it's killer that you can now back-up your DVD's! I'm noticing quite an amount of DVD rippers on the net. Has anyone used FlaskMpeg? I only have a home DVD unit (Sony DVP-S500D), but now I'm considering a drive for my PC. Don't we have a legal right to back-up our own purchased DVDs? LOL...I remember when the MP3 format raised cain with certain groups back in '97. Now you'll find MusicMatch Jukebox on most retail store PC's. And I've sure we're all aware of Napster. I've got a funny feeling that the same will go for DVD's. With the future of larger capacity hard drives, I wouldn't be surprised to see some form of "DVDJukebox" software being sold with an incredible compression ratio/quality.

[Szech]

I use FlaskMPEG, SithLord075. It's a really good program IMO. Oh yeah, and something I forgot to mention, is that if you want the file to fit on a CD, you (obviously) have to get it under 700 megs. That can be a pain... On some of my longer DVD's, I have had to recompress the source files four times because the file came out too big. Compression takes about 10 hours, repeat four times, and that's 40 hours of computing spent trying to get the stupid thing to fit on a CD-R.

But it's better than losing my original DVDs.

[SithLord075]

Interesting, Szech, how's the qualtity of the finished product? From what I understand, don't most TV's run at a resolution of 720x4-something? What resolution do you encode your flicks with? I've read a little bit about FlaskMpeg at Tom's Hardware.

[muno]

Szech, try a util called 'divx bitrate calc'. Pretty useful, it allows you to calculate the effective bitrate to fit your movie onto a cd. Can't remember a site, but it should be widely available =)
-M

[Mark@TheZone]

I have used flask in the past and recommend it.Intel read a review of their P4 on tomshardware.com claiming flask results proved their P4 was slow.Intel got mad and rewrote the code of flask to double the program's speed. Now instead of taking 7 hours to convert a rip to CD (Divx)it does it in 3.5 hours on a 1 Ghz P3.Intel's special fast version can be found at www.digital-digest.com. (http://www.digital-digest.com.) Mark