Ripping DVDs in Linux/ openSUSE

[Jonny88]

Hi

I am currently trying to rip some DVDs to watch on my laptop rather than dragging a whole bunch of DVDs around with me. I am currently doing this in Handbrake using H264 and audio passthrough, this works fine and plays back in windows and linux through VLC, however, it is very slow to rip and encode.

I realise what I can do is "batch" lots of encoding to be done overnight instead, but I only have one DVD drive. What I want to do is create some .iso files from my DVDs which I can then batch up to encode overnight. Anybody know the soloution to this? I've heard about AnyDVD for windows but I was hoping for something in Linux, preferably freeware. I've also seen DVD Decrypt but again its windows, and also not been updated for nearly ten years.

Cheers
Jonny

[yancek]

What I want to do is create some .iso files from my DVDs

You could try devede which will probably be in the repositories for Opensuse

[mactruck]

When I tried handbreak (many years ago) it was not very customizable. This is bad when you are trying to create transparent encodes. Also Handbreak does not update its x264 program often enough. I don't know if you are going to transparency or not. It It sounds like you mostly want to just back up your DVD's. When I still used Windows I used MeGUI to encode the video to mkv and I used anydvd to dip my blurays and I used dvdcyptor on DVD's. I know there is a way to do this on Linux and have been meaning to give it a try. But if you are just backing up everything then I think handbreak is going to be your best bet. Unless you decide you want to encode for transparency. If you are looking to make a DVD out of your mkv file then follow this guide here.

[Rubberman]

I use dvdbackup. You need the libdvdcss packages installed in order to remove the CSS encryption and region code cruft. It will put the dvd VOB files into a specified root directory with sub-directories AUDIO_TS (usually empty) and VIDEO_TS (contains the data). The root directory can then be dropped onto a video player such as kaffeine or VLC to play (all the menus intact), or you can write the directory tree to an ISO file. In either form (directory or ISO) you can burn to disc. I use K3b for both creating the ISO, or writing to disc. It has a useful gui and a lot of control over disc write speed and such. I sometimes use Brasero to write DVD discs, but prefer K3b generally.

[Jonny88]

Hi

Thanks for the advice

I do not want to burn DVDs

I want to make mpegs from them, preferably overnight.
To do this I need to rip the DVD to ISO, is there an easier/quicker way than rubberman described?

Thanks

[Rubberman]

Well, you don't need to rip to iso, just to mpeg2. First, rip to the directory structure as explained using dvdbackup. Then, use ffmpeg to convert the .vob files to mpeg2. Since both dvdbackup and ffmpeg are command line tools, these can be scripted pretty easily.

[Miven]

tccat -i /mnt/dvd -T 3,2,1 > dvd_title3_chapter2_angle1.mp2

works pretty good too, for pulling a specific title and chapter from a dvd without copying the entire vob first. For this you need to get a fair bit of info about the dvd. I use lsdvd. tccat comes from the transcode package. You'll probably want mjpegtools and vobcopy also.

[Rubberman]

tccat -i /mnt/dvd -T 3,2,1 > dvd_title3_chapter2_angle1.mp2

works pretty good too, for pulling a specific title and chapter from a dvd without copying the entire vob first. For this you need to get a fair bit of info about the dvd. I use lsdvd. tccat comes from the transcode package. You'll probably want mjpegtools and vobcopy also.

Just don't confuse tccat with tcat. Very different tools! Thanks for the leads - I'll have to check them out for addition to my video toolbox.

The default tcat command is an audio compression tool (Linux version of Toast - transcodes audio files to gsm format). There is also the Tcat server for development and management of Apache Tomcat application servers.