The Last DVD and Blu-Ray Ripping Guide You'll Ever Need
Ripping Your First Disc
HandBrake makes it easy to select ripping and transcoding options that are just right for your purposes.
For simple, high-quality rips of any kind of content for any type of device, it’s tough to beat HandBrake. We like HandBrake for a few reasons: Its built-in presets make it very easy for anyone to use, it does a good job of detecting the proper video, audio, and subtitle selections, and it has never failed to successfully rip a DVD—and we’ve ripped hundreds of discs.
To rip your first disc, drop it in your DVD drive and click the Source button in the top-left corner of the HandBrake window. Unless you have multiple optical drives, the disc in your DVD drive should be one of the listed Source options. If it’s not, select the folder option and navigate to your optical drive. HandBrake will take a minute or two to scan the contents of your disc and will do its best to determine the appropriate titles and chapters on the disc. HandBrake is generally spot-on for movie DVDs, although you’ll probably need to manually select the proper chapters and titles for discs that contain TV shows.
After HandBrake has familiarized itself with your disc, you need to select the proper output preset. For streaming to or playback on most Apple devices, the Apple Universal preset is terrific. It looks great and works well on the iPhone, newer iPod Classics, and the AppleTV. For streaming to the PS3, Xbox 360, or pretty much anything else, we typically recommend a modified PS3 preset. The PS3 preset uses the H.264 video codec in an MP4 container to encode your disc’s video at its native resolution using a variable bitrate that’s also compatible with the Xbox 360. It automatically downmixes your disc’s 5.1 audio to a 2.0 Dolby ProLogic II stream. Load the default PS3 preset and then enable both the two-pass encode and the turbo first-pass options. Both the Apple Universal and the modified PS3 preset are appropriate for archival purposes.
Next, flip to the Audio & Subtitles tab and ensure that the proper subtitle and audio selections are checked. If the movie includes some subtitles, you should select the first English subtitle track and check the Forced Subtitles Only box. If you’re not sure, it’s best to go ahead and check the Forced Subtitles Only box. Don’t worry, if the disc is mastered properly and doesn’t have subtitles, it won’t affect your rip at all. Once you’re happy with your settings, you can press the + button in the preset window to save your profile (we recommend giving it a different default name than the others). Unfortunately, caption settings aren’t saved in presets, so you have to manually set them each time you rip another disc.
The Audio & Subtitle tab reveals the tracks that are available to you.
Before you can start the encode, you need to tell HandBrake where to save the finished rip and what to call it. You can save the resulting file anywhere on your hard drive. Once you’ve done that, press the Start button to begin the encode. Depending on the number of cores you have and the speed of your processor, encoding can take anywhere from 40 minutes to several hours.
Ripping Multiple DVDs at Once
We load up a bunch of video files to HandBrake's queue and let the utility transcode the whole lot of them while we sleep.
Because the transcoding process takes a lot of time and monopolizes your CPU, it’s helpful to queue up several discs to be transcoded at a time when you’re not using your PC. You can do this by copying the full DVDs to your hard disk and then queuing several movies in HandBrake to transcode one after the other.
If you’re using AnyDVD, you can start the DVD ripping tool by right-clicking the tray icon and selecting Rip Video DVD to Harddisk. Tell the app where to save the disc’s contents and click Copy. You can do this for as many discs as you have hard disk space to hold. Then open HandBrake and click the Source button. Point the app to the folder that you copied your discs to and select the first one. Instead of selecting Start after you’ve selected the proper profile and tweaked your audio and subtitle settings, click Add to Queue. Repeat this for each disc you’ve copied to your hard drive and press Encode when you’re ready to start transcoding.
Ripping TV show DVDs
You can determine which files are actual TV episodes by looking at the playtime.
Ripping TV shows is trickier than ripping a single large movie, but it’s similar to the procedure we outlined for queuing multiple discs. Different studios use different techniques for organizing chapters, but the basic idea is the same. First, load your DVD in HandBrake; then find the individual episodes in HandBrake’s Source section. The easiest way to find episodes is to look at the playtime for each title within the Video_TS folder. Typically, 30-minute TV shows are around 23 minutes long and hour-long shows are about 46 minutes, you can disregard anything that doesn’t seem the correct length, unless your disc has double episodes or pilots.
Once your settings are right and you’ve found your titles, you can add each individual episode to the queue. Make sure you assign each episode a unique name, or HandBrake will overwrite the old episodes as you rip new ones. After the episodes have been ripped, you’ll need to make sure that each one is properly named; frequently, the first title on the disc isn’t the first one that’s listed in the menu.