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Rip DVDs for Playback on Your iPhone, PSP, Xbox 360, PS3, AppleTV, or Any H.264-Enabled Player

Will Smith — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 12:00:00 -0600

It’s hard to believe in the iTunes era of blink-and-you-miss-them CD rips, but in the mid-90s, ripping a CD was a time-consuming process, fraught with peril. Ripping a single disc to 128kbps MP3 could take 8 hours on a 200MHz Pentium! Fast forward a decade, with faster hardware and better software and CD ripping is so mainstream your mom does it.

Ripping DVDs and transcoding the video stored within into more efficient formats involves an order of magnitude more scary math than ripping audio CDs. A machine that will rip the latest Miley Cyrus CD in moments could take hours to extract and convert your copy of AVP to an iPod-friendly format. However, with the right software, a quad-core equipped PC, and a little know-how, you can cut your disc rip time from hours to 20 or 30 minutes. There are still plenty of tricks and traps for first-time rippers, but we’ll show you the basics, then walk you through the secrets of ripping power users everywhere.

However, the first thing you need to decide is simple: what player are you ripping your discs for? Are you ripping for a portable player, like the PSP or iPhone? Would you rather stream to device in your living room, like the Xbox 360, PS3, or Popcorn Hour? Are you simply interested in making an archival-quality DVD rips, in case you lose your collection? More likely, you’re probably looking for a combination of all three of these things. We’ll show you how to rip your DVD to a file suitable for streaming that consumes a fraction of the disk space of a DVD but maintains full video and audio quality. Then you can take that file, and convert it for whatever other devices you might have, like a PSP or an iPod. For the purposes of this story, we're going to focus on DVD rips. Getting ahold of unencrypted high-defintion video legally is still pretty tricky. We'll update with Blu-ray ripping info as ripping Blu-ray gets easier.

With the preliminaries out of the way, let’s get started.

Determining Your Target Player

There are several different factors that determine the compatibility of your ripped video files. The resolution of the video, the video and audio codecs, the container format used, and even more esoteric things like the framerate can affect whether your video will work on your device of choice. If you just rip discs as you need the content and then delete files afterward, simply rip to the target of choice. However, if you want to build an archive of ripped movies, we recommend that you use open, widely-supported codecs and containers at the native resolution of the DVD, and then transcode the files as you need them to lower resolutions and bitrates. Naturally, we’ll show you how to do both.

Your player selection also impacts your choices when it comes to audio tracks and subtitle support. While the most common container formats, mp4 and mkv, support multiple track and subtitle streams in one file, few players will work with multiple audio tracks, and an even smaller subset will work with subtitles. That means you need to rip a single audio track—typically the main movie’s English soundtrack—and burn the subtitles into the video, rather than leave them as separate streams inside the container.

Bitrate is a little trickier. Most hardware players will handle whatever bitrate you select, especially if they're designed for high-definition playback. Both consoles and the AppleTV support high-definintion files, so they're more than capable of playing DVD-resolution video at whatever bitrate you choose. However, the higher a bitrate you choose, the larger the file will be. From our testing, we found the sweet spot for most movies to be around 2000kbps average, but we cranked it up to 2500kbps for movies with a lot of action. If your hardware supports high-profile H.264 (Xbox 360, PS3, and the Apple TV do, but many portable players don't), you can get away with a lower bitrate. With 1.5TB hard drives available for about $180 now, we'd rather rip at a too-high bitrate to ensure maximum quality video than save a few hundred MB of disk space.

We typically recommend ripping to the MP4 container, it’s widely supported on both streaming devices and portables. Furthermore, the tools for manipulating the streams within the file are established and easy to use, which makes it easy to transcode your video to a less supported format for a specific player.

A Word About Subtitles

Typically, DVDs include multiple subtitle streams that serve different purposes. Nearly every DVD has some English subtitles, even non-foreign language movies. It’s important that you understand the difference between subtitles and closed captions. Subtitles are simply the dialog from the movie written across the bottom of the screen. Closed captions include subtitles, but they also include audio cues that help people with impaired hearing enjoy the movie fully.

While closed captions are present on almost every disc, many English-language movies also use subtitles to show what a character speaking a foreign language is saying. On some discs, these subtitles will be hidden in a separate stream, while in others, they’ll be mixed in with the closed-captions, but marked so that the DVD player only shows the proper captions. Regardless, it’s crucial that you get the proper subtitles for all the films you rip. Otherwise, you’ll never know what Jabba or Greedo are saying in Star Wars, and watching a long expository scene in another language without the benefit of subtitles sucks.

In practice, the first English subtitle track is typically the one that includes subtitles and forced or otherwise, while the second subtitle track is the one that includes closed captions.

Bypassing Copy Protection

The first thing you’ll need to do when ripping a DVD is remove the copy protection. Most discs use a variant of the Content Scrambling System (CSS), but many also use other techniques to make it more difficult to extract the video from the disc. Although DVD ripping apps, like HandBrake and AutoMKV aren’t updated as frequently as new copy protection schemes come out, there are a pair of utilities that are dedicated to stripping copy protection—AnyDVD (€49, www.slysoft.com) and DVD43 (free, www.dvd43.com).

Both apps do a fine job, although AnyDVD justifies its high price by bypassing new forms of encryption extremely quickly after they appear. Both of these apps serve as on-the-fly disc decrypters, stripping copy protection before your ripping utility or playback software even knows the disc is present. Want to rip an unencrypted disc to hard drive? It’s as easy as copying the contents of the disc’s VIDEO_TS file to your hard drive once you’ve installed AnyDVD or DVD43. Regardless, before we continue, you should install one or the other of these apps. AnyDVD is free to try for 30 days, while DVD43 is always free.

Ripping Your First Disc

For simple, high-quality rips of any kind of content, 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 drive and click the Source button in the top-left corner of the Handbrake window. If you’re using AnyDVD or DVD43, you can safely ignore the prompt asking for the location of VLC. If you aren’t, you’ll need to download VLC. Unless you have multiple optical drives, the disc in your DVD-ROM should be one of the listed options. If it’s not, select the choose a 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’s 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 (more on ripping TV shows here).

After Handbrake’s familiarized itself with your disc, you need to select the proper output preset. For streaming to or playback on, the Apple Universal preset is terrific. It looks great, and works great on the iPhone, newer iPod Classics, and the Apple TV. For streaming to the PS3, Xbox 360, or pretty much anything else, we typically recommend a modified PS3 preset. If you don't care about the details, you can just choose Handbrake's default PS3 preset, which uses the H.264 video codec to encode your disc’s video at its native resolution using 2500kbps 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.

Once you've selected a preset, make sure that both the two-pass encode and the turbo first pass options are checked on the video tab. Then flip to the Audio/Subtitles tab and ensure 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 it. Don’t worry, if the disc is mastered properly and there are no 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.

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, and your encode will start. Depending on the number of cores you have and the speed of your processor, encoding could take anywhere from 40 minutes to several hours.

Ripping Multiple DVDs at Once

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 DVD to hard disk. 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 when 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

Ripping TV shows is a little trickier than ripping a single large movie, but it’s similar to the procedure we just outlined for queuing multiple discs. Different studios use different techniques, but the basic idea is the same. First you need to load your DVD in Handbrake. Then, find the individual episodes in Handbrake’s source section. The easiest way to to find episodes is to look at the playtime for each chapter or title. Typically 30 minute TV shows are around 23 minutes and hour-long shows are about 46 minutes. Once your settings are right and you’ve found the right titles, you can add each individual episode to the queue. Make sure you assign each one 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 menus.

Converting Your Ripped Files to Another Format

By now you should have quite a few movies and TV shows ripped in a high-quality archival format. However, many devices won’t play videos encoded at this resolution or bitrate. Lucky for us, Handbrake makes it easy to convert videos to other formats. All you need to do is load the video you want to convert using the Source menu, and then choose the appropriate preset or output settings for your player and transcoded away. You can even queue multiple files for conversion.

Playback and Streaming

Now that you’ve ripped your DVD collection, how do you stream the videos into your living room? The easy way to stream MP4 files to your Xbox is to install the Zune Marketplace software, which you can download at Zune.net (whether you own a Zune or not). Once you add the videos to the Zune software and enable sharing, you’ll be able to open them using any Xbox 360 on your home network.

If you want to stream to a PlayStation 3, it’s a little more complex. Fortunately, we have a how-to that explains exactly how to use TVersity to stream video from your PC to your PS3, Xbox 360, or any other UPNP-enabled device. It can be a little tricky to get TVersity running properly, especially if you’ve installed a ton of codecs on your system.

We’ve also heard great things about PacketVideo (formerly known as TwonkyMedia). We haven’t tested Twonky since the 4.4 version came out, but it has strong reviews from the community and might be worth trying out. It offers many features that are comparable to TVersity, and is reportedly easier to install and run to boot. If you’ve had trouble getting codecs working with TVersity in the past, PacketVideo is a great option.

If you just want to watch the videos on your PC, there are lots of options. If you have a recent version of WinDVD or PowerDVD, either of those apps should play the videos with hardware acceleration to boot. A good free alternative is VLC, which should play pretty much any video file you throw at it.Or, if you don't mind fiddling with lots of codec incompatibilities, you can install one of the codec packs that float around the Internet, like CCCP, and play your movies in Windows Media Player or Media Player Classic.

Now go enjoy your movie library!

Make Bit-Perfect Archives of Your CDs With FLAC

Michael Brown — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 20:02:52 -0500

Audio CDs are susceptible to damage and aging, so it’s a good idea to make archival copies of your collection. We’ll show you how, using the lossless compression algorithm FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec).

A lossless encoder compresses digital audio files with absolutely no compromise in fidelity compared to the original. The only drawbacks are large file sizes (though they’re much smaller than WAV files) and scarce support among portable players. On the other hand, FLAC enjoys wide support among audio-streaming boxes.

What You’ll Need

Your audio CD collection
Exact Audio Copy (free)
FLAC (free)
AccurateRip (free)

STEP 1: INSTALL EAC AND FLAC

Exact Audio Copy (EAC) will detect and attempt to auto-configure any optical drives on your system during setup. Check those you wish to use and click Next. Use the “I prefer to have accurate results” option and click Next.

Choose the option “I don’t trust these values…,” drop a clean audio CD in the drive, and click Next. It’s crucial that the drive you rip from has an “accurate stream,” meaning it does not produce “jitter” (if the drive can’t accurately seek a specific sector on the disc, ripped tracks will have audible distortion).

Remove the checkmark next to “Install and configure LAME…” and click Next. Enter an email address and click Next. Choose the Expert option at the final prompt and click Finish. Exit EAC.

Install FLAC, ignoring the Winamp and Nero messages. Leave checkmarks next to all the default options and click Install.

STEP 2: INSTALL ACCURATERIP

Using AccurateRip and EAC’s Test & Copy option will provide an added measure of assurance that your rips are precise and worthy of your archive.

Install AccurateRip and then copy the file accuraterip.dll from C:\program files\illustrate\dbpoweramp to C:\program files\exact audio copy. Put a CD in the drive and relaunch EAC. Click the Configure button and then click OK. Select all tracks and click EAC’s Action menu. Choose Copy Selected Tracks from the drop-down menu; use the uncompressed option.

AccurateRip will compare your results to a database of rips by others and report a confidence level. “Confidence 30,” for example, means your rip is identical to that of 30 other people, so there’s a high probability it’s accurate. Click OK.

STEP 3: CONFIGURE EAC

Click the EAC menu and choose EAC Options. Click the General tab. Leave these options at their defaults but place a checkmark next to “On unknown CDs” and select the option “Automatically access online freedb database.” Click the Tools tab and place checkmarks next to everything except “Create ‘.m3u’ playlist…,” “Do not open external…,” and “Activate beginner mode.”

Click the Filename tab and enter the values %A\%C\%N - %T into Naming Scheme to create a nested directory structure that follows the Artist Name\Album Title\Track Number - Track Title scheme. Check “Use various artist naming scheme” and enter the values Various Artists\%C\%N - %A %T so compilation albums are stored in a “Various Artists” folder broken up by album. Click OK.

Click the EAC menu again and choose Drive Options and Extraction Method. Make sure Secure Mode is selected, with a checkmark next to “Drive has Accurate Stream feature.” Click the Drive tab and check “Spin up drive before extraction.” Leave everything else at default and click OK.

Click the EAC menu once more, choose Compression Options and External Compression. Check “Use external program for compression.” In the drop-down menu “Parameter passing scheme,” select “User Defined Encoder.” Type .flac in the “Use file extension” box.

Click Browse, locate the FLAC executable (flac.exe), select it, and click OK. Enter these characters into “Additional command line options”: -6 -V -T “artist=%a” -T “title=%t” -T “album=%g” -T “date=%y” -T “tracknumber=%n” -T “genre=%m” -T comment=”%e” -T “comment=EAC (Secure Mode)” %s. Bitrate doesn’t matter, but check “Delete WAV after compression” and “Check for external compression return code.”

STEP 4: COMMENCE ARCHIVING

Place the audio CD you wish to archive in the drive. Click the Action menu and choose “Test and Copy Selected Tracks” using the Compressed option this time. This will perform a cyclical redundancy check (CRC) to verify the integrity of your rip. It’s another paranoid step, but we think it’s warranted when producing critical backups. An OK will appear in EAC’s CRC column if the rip was executed successfully. Repeat until you’ve backed up your entire library.

April 2006 - Copy Movies and Music!

the Maximum PC Staff — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 08:07:01 -0500

In the PDF archive of the April 2006 issue, you can find:

Rip Anything!
4th Annual Softy Awards!
DIY Laptop
Wi-Fi Wonders!
19 Awesome Product Reviews!
Ask the Doctor
Rig of the Month
The Watchdog
And a whole lot more!

Click the big giant cover image to the right to download the PDF archive today!

March 2005 - Massive Digital Media How-To

The Maximum PC Staff — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0600

In the PDF archive of the March 2005 issue, you can find:

How To: Copy Every Disc You Own!
Digi-Cam Shoot Out!
Case Painting: How to Paint Like a Master Modder
Behind the Scenes Look at Product Testing
11 New Reviews
Ask the Doctor
Rig of the Month
The Watchdog
And a whole lot more!

Click the big giant cover image to the right to download the PDF archive today!

#1 DVD Ripper

Maximum PC — Fri, 14 Jan 2005 15:44:37 -0600

Finally, a reliable, powerful, easy-to-use DVD-to-MPEG4 ripper

Month Reviewed: February 2005
Verdict: 9
URL: www.dvdtox.com

For the last year, Maximum PC editors have scoured the net, searching for a program that seamlessly rips DVD movies and converts them to an MPEG4 based format—namely Divx or Xvid. We’ve tested literally dozens of freeware and shareware apps, all of which suffered from fatal flaws: ridiculously complex set-up processes, constant crashes, and some just plain haven’t worked. Then came the aptly-named #1 DVD Ripper. It’s easy to use, rock-solid stable, and works beautifully every time.

Ripping a DVD with #1 DVD Ripper is simple. First, the software scans your DVD for video content, then breaks out all the videos on the disc by title and chapter. You select the chapters you want to rip, select either a multi-pass or single-pass encode, and then define the audio and subtitle tracks you want to use. Once that’s done, you click Rip, and let #1 DVD Ripper work it’s mojo.

The ripper doesn’t actually ship with any MPEG4 encoders, so you’ll need to download and configure either Xvid or Divx yourself. For best results with either codec, we recommend you go with a two-pass encode, at the very least. On the first pass of a two-pass encode, the encoder first scans the entire video file to suss out a strategy. In fact, on the first pass, no video is actually written to disk! On the second pass (which is usually called the Nth pass in the encoder control panels), the encoder uses the information gathered during the first pass to allocate more bandwidth to difficult-to-encode high-motion scenes. Encoding times are more dependent on the codec you use than the DVD ripping software itself, but you can expect a two-hour DVD to rip and encode each pass in about an hour and forty-five minutes.

In its current version, #1 DVD Ripper requires the user to manually change codec settings between the first and second passes when encoding multi-pass MPEG4 files. We’d really like to see this become automated in order to make one-click DVD rips possible. But even without one-click ripping and encoding, #1 DVD Ripper is undeniably the best DVD archiving program we’ve tested. --Will Smith

+ Fair Use: It’s easy. It works. We love it!

- Piracy: Shouldn’t every thing be automated these days?