DVD format conversion
![]() |
DVD format conversion Organic Design procedure |
It's important to make backup copy's of DVD's you've purchased so that you're not at risk from the original being damaged and becoming unreadable. We use the DVD::Rip application, which after installed can be found in Applications/Sound & Video.
Required components
By default Ubuntu and Debian don't ship with components capable of playing DVD's and therefore ripping DVD's won't work either. Luckily they come with a simple install script that downloads and installs the required components. On Ubuntu 10 the script is in the following location, but you can do locate install-css to find it if it's not in the same place on your own system.
If you don't have install-css on your system you'll need to compile it from source which you can get here, you need to have the build-essential, autoconf and libtool packages installed before compiling. Another option is to see if the libdvdcss2 package is available, for example in Debian it is available in the deb http://www.deb-multimedia.org wheezy main non-free source.
You will also need to install transcode and a codec for encoding the video, we use XVid4 which is installed as follows:
First time setup
You'll need to specify a location for the data used by the ripping operation and where the final ripped results will be stored. I use ~/Videos/rip for my data. next I like to create a default project called rip which has all the correct transcode settings already in place. We use the OGG format and the xvid4 codec. You should also select smart deinterlacing. When you're first setting up, you don't need to select a track or start the transcoding process, instead just save the project from the file menu.
Ripping a DVD track
Run DVD::Rip from Applications/Sound & Video, then go into File/Open Project and select your default project that you created in the first time setup above. Next select and rip the tracks you want as shown below.
Note1: If the DVD content has already been copied into the local file system, then you can miss out this step by ticking the Encode DVD on the fly option in the "Storage" tab.
Note2: You will only be able to transcode all titles at once (and therefore obtain all in a single output file) if you have selected to copy all files to the hard disk first.
Then go to the Transcode tab and ensure that all the settings are correct, select the track you want to rip and click the Transcode button to begin the main ripping process. This should take around an hour for a normal length movie. After it's finished you can find the final result in your home folder in Video/rip/rip/avi. You should check that it looks fine, then rename it to a better name and move it to your proper media location. Delete any other files out of the avi folder so they don't become confusing when you rip other things later.
Troubleshotting
I found that DVD::Rip didn't work out of the box for me, I checked the logging tab and found no errors, but the ripping just stayed at 0%. The logging did output the final shell command it used to do the rip though, so I pasted that into a root shell and this responded saying there were missing components. In my particular case I needed to install the following to get it working: