DVD Ripping

Hi david.

I'm one of the very few users on this board that DON'T use handbrake!

I've recently been ripping some DVD's that I own, as I travel and pick up DVD's from across the world.

Anyway, I use D-Vision, available off the apple downloads web site, and use it with the following settings: 128K for sound, MP3, and 1000K for the video, H264 format

D-Vision rips a lot faster that Handbrake, I've found, and also has support for Duo's, meaning it will be ripping two movies at at time!!!

The quality, at 1MM per second is very good, and you will be pleasantly surprised!

regards

Paul
PS: D-Vision also allows you to split / join AVI's, etc

Hi Dave

The 8-10 hours you quote is quite long, I have to say!

I believe, in answer to your second question, the sound will be in stereo.

If you want to preserve both quality of video and audio, I'd look at just ripping to VOB's, and using the Quicktime MPEG2 playback component, available from apple. The only thing you'll have to consider is then storage! I've considered doing the same thing to my external 250GB external Hard Drive.

Hi Updev,
I was researching this a bit last week and came across a discussion thread that was discussing a little freeware (donations get you the latest up-to-date version) app called DVD ASSIST. Do a google search & the top link is to the developer's site and the second link is to the discussion thread.
You also need an application called Mac The Ripper. This will rip VOB files, full native resolution keeping the sound tracks intact (5.1,6.1,7.1 etc) and menu functions. You then need to do a little housekeeping, placing files in a certain directory structure & create a little QT preview clip etc (Full documentation comes with the download). You then launch DVD Assist (either as a logon item or manually) and the whole lot then plays through Front Row.
You can launch Front Row select MOVIES and search through all your archived films. When you select a film to play, DVD Assist launches Apple DVD Player, shuts down Front Row and the film plays as though you had inserted the actual disk into the optical drive. When the film finishes, DVD Assit Re-launches Front Row and shuts down DVD PLayer.
I have to admit that I have not yet tried it out, but reading the discussion thread and testimonials it appears that it all works rather well. Oh and you will need a decent sized HD as each ripped DVD will be about 7-8 Gig (remember full native res, no wierd compression going on) but as the price of HD is tumbling it shouldn't be too bad.
Hope this helps,
Regards,
Gareth.

Hi updev,

I've done the same thing with my DVD collection. I used Handbrake and just used all the default settings. Only thing I changed was the picture size to 640 width.

Although not DVD quality, this is more than good enough for watching on a normal TV (not HD). Plus, using a width of 640 means they copy onto my iPod without further conversion.

A typical movie takes about 1 hour to convert and is about 1GB in size.