How to rip movies to your PC

Posted by Maeve, 22 Aug, 2012 | No Comments »

The age of the DVD is over, and it’s time for the home media centre to shine. On one hand, it’s really awesome to now have my whole house wired up (or wirelessed up as the case may be), and able to stream films from my PC or media storage device (in my case an AC Ryan) to any screen in my house. But it’s also sad… because it means my pride collection of DVDs is now gathering dust. The solution? Rip those DVDs to the computer, and enjoy.  I’ve experimented with a bunch of different software and tools, and here’s the best way I found to do it.

Note this is perfectly legal because these are legally purchased DVDs which I’m ripping to my own computer for personal use in my home. I’m not planning on distributing the films so its all good.

1. Grab a copy of DVD Shrink   Get it installed and configured (it’s pretty easy & obvious but there are guides online if you need help).

2. Open your disc using DVD Shrink. Hit “Re-Author” and drag across the main titles for the movie. There’s no need to worry about compression or other settings at this stage, we’re just using this software to get the files off the disc.

3. Hit “Backup!” This will ‘rip’ the files from the DVD to a temporary folder on your computer. The program is designed to then burn out the files to a blank disc but we’re going to stop it before it does that so we can just keep the files.

4. When it’s done, locate the VOB files (for a normal length film there are usually 1-4 VOB files sequentially labelled).

5. Now we use a tiny program called JoinVobFiles to – you guessed it – join the files together.

Now we have a single VOB file of the movie, which is great, but unnecessarily large file size and in a format not all players can deal with. So now we want to convert the VOB into a video file size and format of our choice. What you choose will depend on personal preferences and on the type of device/s you want to play it on.

6. I use Handbrake to convert the file to either mp4 or mkv. It does a really good job on it’s automatic settings.

Done!