Dec 27 2005
How To Copy A Commercial DVD
How to rip a DVD: A Tutorial, describes how to copy the contents of a commercial DVD video. For backups purposes only, of course.
Phillip: is this how you do it?
(via digg)
From now on, I’ll connect the dots my own way.
The link you provide shows up blank through FireFox, so the answer is no, that’s not how I do it. But when I want to make a backup copy of a DVD, I generally following this DVD Shrink guide. I have yet to find anything that works better than DVD Shrink (and it’s free). Applications that claim to make perfect copies of DVDs are lying. It is impossible to make an exact copy of a 8GB DVD on to a 4GB DVD-R. Though if your standard is VHS, you probably won’t notice the difference. I prefer my DVD-R copies over my regular DVDs anyway, because I remove all the menus, the FBI warning and all the other junk. All I want is the movie (and sometimes the commentary track), and that’s all I copy. The movie actually plays the seconds it’s inserted into the DVD player. Nice.
That’s interesting: your link is similar to the link the site above refers to: http://www.mrbass.org/dvdrip/
The link you have there now seems to work. First off, DVD Shrink is easier to use than DVD Decrypter. And that comes from someone who hates having to figure out how to use new programs.
Also, at first glace, the tutorial you link to is for people who want to make AVI copies of DVDs. The only reason you’d want to do that is to upload them for Torrents. AVIs will do you if you want a bootleg copy of a DVD and you don’t care too much about the quality, but AVIs (and Xvid AVIs), as nice looking as they are sometimes, are still heavily compressed compared to the original DVD. They might look okay on your PC monitor, but try playing them on a large TV or an HD TV, and, campared to the original DVD, they look like crap. Still, for a movie that doesn’t cost you anything, I guess it’s good enough.
MrBass has a bunch of similar guides, along with some other interesting goodies.
I’m trying this now, except I’m using DVD Shrink.
My PC is still processing the file (which is only a 23-minute video). It’s taking a long time. And it looks like Virtual Dub does the final rendering of the AVI.
Using a 1.83 GHz AMD processor and 500mb of RAM, converting a 23-minute DVD into a 400mb AVI took several hours (I wasn’t taking track, but it more than couple hours). A full movie would probably take all day, and you wouldn’t be able to do too much else because video encoding pushes most CPUs to the brink.
If you really wanted to make a back-up copy of a DVD, you’d never convert it to AVIs. AVIs are fine for PC monitors, but are pretty dismal when viewed on a TV screen. These AVIs make illegal distrubution over Torrents fastier and easier, but the quality of these files once converted back to DVD is nowhere comparable to original or what you’d get from a DVD Shrink backup. DVD Shrink makes excellent copies which you can either leave on your hard drive or burn to a DVD-R.