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Ripping DVDs !

Ripping DVDs - It's a simple question: "How do I take video off a DVD and make another video from it?"

Ripping copyright material is illegal. See legal disclaimer at bottom!!

You know the situation: You have a DVD that someone has sent you - it's Jimmy and Janey playing touch football in the back yard. All you really want is about 30 seconds of the footage to put into a family DVD you're creating. So you need to be able to extract footage from the DVD and manipulate it

But how do you do that?

Well the first thing I would say is "DON'T".

If you can avoid ripping a DVD then please do. The reason is straightforward: DVD footage is heavily compressed and manipulating compressed footage (especially if you have to compress it further) will degrade the quality. Click here to read about compression

However, if you are intent on ripping DVDs then it is really a 3 stage process.

   1. Rip the DVD contents
   2. Edit the resulting files
   3. Burn back to a DVD (or Youtube, or wherever)

1) Rip the DVD contents.

DVD's are peculiar things. They use their own compression algorithms and their own internal structure. The upshot of all of this is that you can't just 'browse' a DVD's contents, identify the footage you want and copy that somewhere. You have to undertake a process known as 'Ripping' your DVD. (Don't worry, it's all perfectly safe. No DVD's will actually be harmed!)

Ripping DVD's is the process of decoding (or decrypting) the internal DVD contents and creating them on your hard drive in a format that a video editor can understand.

There are several tools available for ripping DVD's. Some are better than others, some are commercial and some are free. I would recommend the decryptor from DVD Videosoft.

Load up the program, select your DVD and rip the contents to your hard drive.

Depending on the software you use you may have to copy the WHOLE DVD to your hard drive or you may be able to specify start and end points. Note that getting frame accurate edits from a DVD is tricky because of the way the DVD is encoded. Basically they use a master frame (B frame)which is totally encoded and then for the following x frames they only save the changes from the previous frame (I frames). Then they add another master frame (B frame). Generally if you want an edit that falls between the master frames you won't get it, it will default to the nearest B frame.

Ultimately you will end up with a set of video files on your hard drive They could be in any format, but will probably be in MPEG2 format. If you can specify which format to save to, try to use something such as AVI, which most editors recognise. If you need to convert you'll have to find an appropriate conversion tool.

2) Edit the resulting files

Usually if you've ripped something from a DVD the reason you did this is because you want to do something with the resulting footage. You might want to incorporate it into another video you are putting together, or you might want to do something a bit more esoteric such as grab a frame or two from it to put in an album.

If you're looking to do further editing to the file (either to edit the information ripped from the DVD or to include the ripped footage into another file), then there are a whole host of free editing tools you can use.

Depending on the format of the footage you have ripped the editing tool might need to be different. If you've ripped a DVD to an MPEG format, there aren't a great number of tools that will edit in that format natively and you may need to convert to another format. (Note: the conversion may cause a loss in quality of your footage as a result of the compression issues I mentioned at the beginning of this article)

3) Create your final film

Once edited, the final film will need to be rendered. If you've added anything like titles, effects, fade's or other transitions the film will need to go through a compression again. This will result in a loss of quality. If you have found a video editor that edits MPEG natively, and all you've done is trim the footage down to size then you may be able to get away without actually recoding the footage, thus saving a generation of quality.

If you're looking to drop the resulting footage back onto a DVD you'll need to find a burning solution that will do this for you. Free versions include DVD-Flick and DVD Videosoft.

Other things you may want to do with this are create a version for your PSP, iPod, iPhone or upload to Youtube. Again the DVD Videosoft suite of tools can assist with this. Remember when creating a Youtube video that the basic compressed nature of DVD, coupled with the automatic recompression done by Youtube will result in 'blocky' or 'chunky' footage.

Summary

The key thing to remember with DVD footage is to keep it in the same format as long as possible. If you have to recode or re-compress you are going to lose quality. But with the right tools (free, of course) this is something than can be of use to most people.

Legal Note: Ripping copyright DVD's to create unauthorised copies is against the law. You are allowed to create one copy for back-up purposes in another medium (i.e in a media storage centre) though. Do not make illegal copies of copyright material.

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