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DVD Ripping and Encoding Hello! Your favorite columnist is back with some more interesting reading material this month at MOSJ! ...and when you finish reading that person's column, you might want to read this month's Warehouse too. In this column I'll be breaking even more copyright laws as I delve into the world of DVD ripping and encoding and share my experiences with you. So, what is DVD ripping and encoding? Well, it's quite similar to ripping and encoding MP3s which you may remember me talking about in another column. Ripping a DVD is the process of removing part (or all) of the contents of a DVD and storing the data on your hard drive. Encoding is the process of turning that data into something most computers are capable of playing. In this column, I'll be encoding the data into a QuickTime movie. Why would someone want to turn a DVD into a QuickTime movie? Well, I
wanted to use some images from DVDs to make a custom desktop picture for
my computer. Unfortunately, you cannot take screenshots of DVD playback
with the current versions of Apple DVD Player, but you can take screenshots
of QuickTime movies. So, if I can turn a DVD into a QuickTime movie, I
can take pictures of it. Aren't I clever?
Gathering Equipment For the information in here to be useful, you'll need to have
a Macintosh computer with a DVD player, at least one actual DVD, and at
least a couple gigs of free hard drive space. Then you need to download
some stuff - and guess what? It's free! DVD Extractor 0.9b Newer versions of these utilities may be available by the time you read this. If so, the newer versions should work just about the same as the ones I used.
First, We Rip... The first utility you'll want to use is DVD Extractor. This is a very simple program. You put a DVD into your computer and start the program. DVDExtractor will show the names of the different sections of the DVD along with the sizes. You can select to view by Tracks, Chapters, Scenes, Cells, and Objects. Tracks, Chapters, and Scenes will be the most useful for starting out. If you look at tracks, the biggest one is typically the movie, but if you don't want to rip the whole movie, (or don't have the hard disk space for it all,) you can pick a chapter or scene to rip instead. To do the ripping, just highlight the section (or consecutive sections) you want to rip, check the MPEG-2 video (m2v) box on the right, and choose Save from the File menu. DVDExtractor will save the video data onto your Hard Drive in a file that ends with ".m2v". On my computer, it took about 1 minute per 100MB being ripped, so keep that in mind if you are ripping a very large portion.
The only difficult thing about this program is knowing what section you want to rip. You don't get to see a preview or anything like that. One thing you can do is put the DVD into a conventional DVD player and when it shows the part you want to rip, look at the display on the DVD player. Most standard DVD players will show the Track and Chapter which makes it easier to narrow down your choices. From there, you can usually get the scene you want with a little bit of trial and error.
...Next, We Encode By itself, that .m2v file you have on your hard drive is quite useless. It won't do anything in it's current form, for it's just raw DVD data. Now it's time to use MPEG2Decoder. This program does two things - it decodes the m2v (DVD) format and then encodes it into QuickTime format. After you do that, it can be played on any computer that has QuickTime installed.
When you open MPEG2Decoder, it will show an Open... Dialogue box. Select the m2v file that was created with DVDExtractor. You will be presented with several video quality options at this point. You can see my settings in the picture above. I chose the Sorenson Video compressor because it produces high-quality images and doesn't use up too much hard drive space. (The compressor options may not be the same on all computers) Unfortunately, that increases the amount of time it takes to encode. When you have the settings how you like them, click OK and you will be asked for a save location. After that, the decoding/encoding process begins. There are a few things I should warn you about. While MPEG2Decoder is doing it's work, your computer will be 100% dedicated to this task until it is finished, and you will not be able to do anything else on it. This also takes a very long time. How long does it take? Well, you should probably have other things to do. What I did was eat lunch, go to class, put gas in my car, browse the web (on a different computer), eat dinner, install a game, play the game, surf web some more, work on homework, talk on ICQ, take nap, wake up... ...and it was still going! With the settings I used, it took nine hours and seven minutes to convert a 233.2 MB m2v file into a 545.6 MB QuickTime (mov) movie. Did I mention that this was only 13:38 of video? No, that is not 13 hours and 38 minutes either - that is 13 minutes and 38 seconds. Of course, it was 800x600 pixels, and the image quality was excellent. My computer's no slouch. It's a PowerBook with a 400MHz G3 processor. This would have taken less time if I didn't use the Sorenson Video compressor, but then the file size of the QuickTime movie would have been even bigger. Be prepared for the final QuickTime movie to be several times larger than the m2v file. Other things I could have done to save time would have been to use a lower quality setting or lower framerate. (If anybody wants to send me a dual 800MHz G4, that would also improve the encoding speed) Anyway, the movie can now be played on any computer that has QuickTime.
The Sound of Silence Guess what? Your QuickTime movie has no audio, just video. Unfortunately, this is not a simple problem to solve either. You see, DVDs can use several different audio formats. Fortunately, AC3 is the most common one. If the DVD you are trying to convert is using AC3 audio, what I'm about to write might work. Unfortunately, you won't know if the DVD uses AC3 audio until you try. You will want to run DVDExtractor again, but, instead of checking the MPEG 2 video box, you'll want to check the MPEG-2audio and Private boxes. This will save any of the supported audio formats to your hard drive. From there, it is just a matter of finding out what format the audio was in. The audio track should end with a period and three letters. If it's in ac3 format, it will end with .ac3. If it's in another format, it will end with the letters that go with that format. Chances are, you'll have several audio tracks saved there, typically these will be for the different language tracks that are contained on the DVD. If they are indeed AC3 files, you can use mAC3Dec to convert the file into an AIFF file which QuickTime can also play. If you made it this far, you can put the video and audio tracks together if you have the registered version of QuickTime or some other video editing software. More bad news. My video track was 13:38. My audio track was only 6:40. I believe this is because it skips over sections where there is no sound. It would take a painfully large amount of cutting and pasting to get the audio track to fit just right with the video. This may not be the case on all DVDs though, for I haven't been able to experiment too much due to the massive amounts of time required.
Out On A Limb... Well, I'm going to leave you hanging now. I've gotten to the end of my knowledge on the topic of DVD ripping and encoding, but luckily you've downloaded the Mac DVD Rip Tutorial. This is an HTML document that contains lots of information on the topic, and it is a great place to look things up if you want to know how to do something. It will take a lot of trial and error to learn the ins and outs of everything, but if you're patient and clever you'll get the hang of it pretty quickly.
Goodbye Until Next Time! Once again, it is time to bid you all farewell. I hope some of you reading this found it to be useful and/or interesting. I really enjoyed working on this column, and I hope you all enjoy reading it. As always, feel free to e-mail me with anything you might have to say. Have a great month, and don't forget to come back in September!
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