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Written by phoenix
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Sunday, 16 March 2008 |
There are several advantages to ripping from the DVD. The biggest is that you don't have to have a capture card or device, thus making it cheaper. The second is that you are working purely with the digital medium. Many capture devices or cards need an analog input that they convert to digital. Some quality, not a significant amount for working with computer friendly file sizes, is sacrificed in this method. That being said, I have tried several different programs to read the data from the DVD into a useable format. The first was a pair of programs. I had huge interlace problems and gave up on that program. I'm sure finding the right settings would have helped.
For Mac users, there is a program called Pure-Mac. For those interested in using the program DVD Shrink, Brent Barrett has written up a tutorial and put it on his site here. This is a very nice tutorial with plenty of pictures to help you out. DVD Shrink is a nice user friendly program. I would actually recommend this over DVDx as it is a tad more user friendly. The one drawback is that you have to put each rip in it's own folder and convert it to MPEG2 or use VirtualDub MPEG Edition (VD) to convert it to AVI and then you can easily combine them into one folder from there, but it is a tad more time consuming than naming the files as they are ripped.
VD MPEG WMV9 Encoding
I've recently discovered a new feature of VD. Uncompressed AVIs are incredibly huge files. Divx has the Divx and Xvid compression codecs, but one problem with this is the ubiquitious Divx bug, which if you use WMM will be all over your video. There is a solution to this problem. VD has the option of compressing using the WMV9 codec. This codec is compatible with the WMP10 player. An 11 second clip that would have been 329MB as uncompressed AVI is now 1.15MB WMV9 compressed AVI.
1. Go to WMP9 Codec page and download and select "Windows Media Encoder", "Windows Media Encoder 9 Series" and install the codec.
2. Open VD and import the clip you wish to convert from VOB.
3. Go to "Video-Compression" or you can type "ctrl+p". Scroll down the menu and select "Microsoft Windows Media Video 9"
4. If you wish to crop the video (in the case of a season 4 or PKW clip) to match aspect ratios (to the standard 4:3) or you have interlacing issues, you can do that here:
a. Click the "Configure" button
b. Select the "Pre-processing" tab
c. Check resize and make the values 640x360
If you need to de-interlace a clip (normally you do) you can select the de-interlace option on this tab. I have found this works as good the filter in the main part of VDub.
5. Once you have made your selections close all the windows and on the main menu select "File-Save as AVI" or "F7". Choose the file name and location and select "Save"
Ripping with VirtualDub
If your source files are xvid or divx files, then getting clips out of the episodes is rather easy. All you need is VirtualDub (VD).
Open your file in VD. If you get any errors, ignore them if your file loads fine afterwards. Some divx and xvid files have non-constant (virtual) audio bitrates that can cause a problem with VD, but those will be irrelevant for this tutorial. If your files don't load, check what error VD gave you. Usually it comes with a tag number. Just google it and you will most probably find a lot of ways to fix it.
Once your file is loaded in VD, this is what you will have to do:
- Change Video from Full processing mode to direct stream copy (1)
- Change audio from source audio to no audio (2). You won't need sound for any of these clips, so just turn it off. If you still want audio for them, leave this setting alone.
- Move the slider (3) to the beginning of the clip that you want to keep from the episode. Set selection end by either pressing the end button on your keyboard or the selection end button at the bottom of the screen (5). You will see that everything before the start of the clip you want to keep is now highlighted in light blue. This is the selection we will delete by pressed the delete button on the keyboard. If for some reason the beginning is not highlighted, move the slider (3) back to the beginning of the file and press either the home button on your keyboard or the selection start button (4). Now everything between selection start and end should be highlighted and you can delete it.
- Now move the slider (3) to the end of the clip want to keep. Hit the selection start button (4) or the home button. Then move the slider (3) to the end of the file. Hit selection end button (5) or the end button. Now everything after the clip will be hightlighted in light blue. Again, hit the delete button to delete this selection.
- Now you only have the clip left you want to keep. Save it as avi (hit F7), and you now have a short clip from the episode that you can import into your editing program.
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