After planning it for a couple years, this week I finally took the time to look in to how to rip my DVDs to an external hard drive. Why? I am VERY anal… I absolutely hate to mess around with original media (DVD, CD, vinyl records, cassettes, etc) because of bad experiences I’ve had with them becoming ruined in some way or another, or even getting scuffed or scratched….. everything must be in NEW/EXECELENT condition!

Anyway, I’ve been slacking with the DVDs for reasons I won’t bore you with. I’m here to explain how *I* did it, and maybe you can now keep yours safe too.

First, I’m currently running Fedora Core 4 on my laptop. I prefer using yum to grab/install software whenever possible. I usually prefer the command line (I LOVE automation), but some times a GUI gets your tasks accomplished with just a few easy clicks.

My first thought was a command line tool called ‘vobcopy’ to actually rip the data from the DVD, but I also wanted to convert it in to a much smaller mpeg or avi so I could just watch my movies from the HD rather than having to physically find and insert any other media…. so I thought ‘transcode’ should be able to do that for me.

(As root) I decided to update / install the needed software:
yum install mplayer ffmpeg transcode vobcopy

I also searched around the net for some DVD Ripping HOW-TO guides, and finally found this awesome guide: DVD Ripping and Transcoding with Linux.

That page talks a lot about how easy this is to do with a new front-end for the transcode app, called DVDrip, and so I decided to try it out:
yum install perl-Video-DVDRip

From that point, it WAS pretty easy:

1. Insert the DVD
2. run ‘dvdrip‘
3. Configure a destination directory
4. Choose which parts of the DVD I wanted to rip
5. Choose some settings for the destination AVI I wanted (compression, etc)
6. And then click a button to GO!

I’ll flesh this out more later, but it really was that easy.

September 7th, 2006
Categories: Linux . Author: rock808

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