The Glade 4.0

First I will start off with my legitimate credits on this...
Here is my DVD collection.

That is up to date and contains only DVDs that I legitimately own. I do not like the idea of owning any pirated DVDs.

Now with that said.. I watch many of these movies on a regular basis. I would watch more and more frequently if I had them on my computer.

I also have the following iTunes digital downloads:
Blue Harvest
The Final Destination
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
Planet 51
Wanted

What I want to do is to find a way to rip some of my movies from the DVD (Blu Ray is right out, no Blu Ray on laptop) to my computer so I do not have to risk taking the physical media out of my home.

Can anyone offer advice on if this can be done, and if so recommendations on how to do it?

Example- I would love to rip all 6 star wars movies to AVI files and watch them while I work over the course of a week. But I really do not like taking the physical media out with me; I could damage the case, forget it in the car and it melts, etc.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

First off, stay the hell away from AVIs. They suck. They're huge. H.264 is what you want.

Secondly, Handbrake is what you need. I use it to rip videos for my iPod. Works on standard commercial DVDs, and have never had a problem with one.

http://handbrake.fr/

Final tip, when ripping, use the normal output setting. The program's pretty damn smart, and will generally know best.

Yup, what FS said. Handbrake rocks.

do I just choose iPod format? I tried to use normal the other day and it gave me crap about not liking the encryption, and the HB forums said they do not decrypt commercial DVDs

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

Sorry, just got your PM.

That's really odd. I have actually ripped Batman Begins myself, with no issues whatsoever. I've a plethora of commercial DVDs ripped, and it's never given me any fits.

Admittedly, I'm ripping on my Macs, but I don't think Darkroland uses Macs, so I doubt that's the disparity.

Can you screenshot the message that pops up when you try to use it?

With Batman begins it gives no specific error, it just will not start to Encode. The cmd prompt window comes up and it sits at .02% with .99 FPS for half an hour.

Tried it again today. Here are the logs it gives me.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

For DVD's, I just use DVD Shrink to rip them in their native format.

Sometimes, after that I will go in and convert them to regular MPG's, but I lose the DVD menu structure that way. It depends on the movie and what I'm using it for. Sometimes, I have trouble streaming the VOB's from my server, and the MPG's seem to work a little better.

It's very fast, about 10-15 mins per rip (another 10 mins or so if I convert to MPG). Handbrake is nice, but it has to completely re-encode the file, which takes a long time, especially on older hardware (around 45 mins to an hour on my hardware, IIRC). And for standard DVD's, there's not much need to compress to h.264 anyway. Unless you are really tight on hard drive space. Regular DVD's are usually around 4-8 GB's per movie/disc, depending on if it's dual-layer or not. And with big hard drives being so inexpensive these days, there's really not a very compelling reason to try and re-encode the file, just to save a few GB's.

Now HD content is a completely different story.

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"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

If I remember correctly (and there's a chance I could be totally wrong) HandBrake needed Mac the Ripper installed to rip on my Mac.

It's been a while.

I'm using FairMount now. It uses VLC to decrypt, so if you can play the media with VLC, you can mount the DVD as a decrypted volume and do anything you want with it.
http://www.metakine.com/products/fairmount

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In time, this too shall pass.

Can you play these DVD's on the PC, right now? I don't remember if Handbrake requires a DVD Decoder installed or not.

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"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

http://handbrake.fr/details.php

I'd try loading the latest version of VLC and seeing if that helps. I'm thinking HandBrake will use the decoder if it can.

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In time, this too shall pass.

Ok, that explains it then. You'd need DVD43 (Free) or AnyDVD (not free) to break the encryption in the background while HB rips the disc.

Or you could just use DVD Shrink and/or DVDFab Decrypter for some of the newer movies that Shrink can't decrypt, since Shrink isn't being updated anymore. You can download a trial of DVDFab, and you'll still be able to use the "rip" portion of the software after the trial is expired.

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"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

Now to ask a dumb question; if I have no intention of redistributing these titles (screw that I spent hard earned money to buy these.. I am not sharing) and keeping them solely for my own personal use; is it okay to do so? I do not know exactly how the Fair Use stuff works.

hrm.. now to see if DVD43 has a 64 bit compatible version

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

You have the right to make a backup, but no right to circumvent the DRM.

If you don't distribute the media, you have about a 0% chance of being noticed.

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In time, this too shall pass.

Anydvd should solve your problems...

Ah, that's why I haven't run into the issue, I personally use DVD Decrypter to create an ISO of a disc before encoding. Also, what Taskiss said. The movie companies do not want you to have control and portability of your media. They would prefer that you repurchase the film from iTunes to watch it on your iPod, thank you very much.

AVI isn't really a video format. It's just a container file. While it is 18 years old and has several limitations and probably shouldn't still be used, it isn't really any "bigger" than any other video file, since its file size is entirely dependant on the codec/compression & video format used to create the file. H.264 is another name for "MPEG-4 AVC" or AVCHD, and actually supports several container file types. The funny thing is, due to naming confusion, an XVID file can be compressed using H.264 and have an .AVI extension.

And they expect us to figure this stuff out.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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