A Quick And Simple Guide To Ripping Your Dvds For Your Pandora

[Poem58]

I don't know if it would be ok to post clips, as that's not my area of expertise, I'm afraid. I'm certainly willing to give impressions, though.

OK, while I highly doubt uploading and posting a link to say 10 seconds of any video would cause any troubles (especially when most of the upload hosting sites expire after a week or so)
and likely there would only be say 3 clips from 3 different sources (maybe I can find some home video type of stuff I may have) I won't post anything without mod approval. Hey if the government here in the US said ripping DVDs for educational purposes was legal, it'd be hard to complain about 10 random seconds for learning about encoding.

If anything since these clips will likely be only a couple of MB, I'll PM you the links or something, but if they can be posted all Pandorians can get the feel for the results as well.
Grey area, but since so far I cannot even find a way in handbrake to make a clip, it's kinda moot. Screenshots would do anyway as they tend to look much worse than the motion video, so they will be easier to deal with and pose no problems.

Well, done for now. Let's see what I come up with for tomorrow.

 

[Prometheus]

I couldn't edit at the time, but I have to say that I'm not sure what the situation would be with links to clips, either.

 

[Poem58]

Like I said, not a problem, it's not like I have to make clips of a summer blockbuster movie or anything. I'm sure if we wanted to post video examples of 10 seconds in length, there has to be some good free video content with wich to do this. While the example may show encoding examples for your DVD, the video itself doesn't have to be from a copyrighted one I guess.
I just was trying to make it simpler as I had the Looney Tunes DVD right here. But if you think that clips and posting those clips would benefit people, I can always try to find some video we can use for this purpose. So I guess we can just forget about copyright issues and decide what examples would be best to show people.

So between the two of us we can make the tutorial into a nice "here are some examples of setting you could use" as well. I know I just recorded some 720p video of the sky on my friends camera, could use that if it's able to be converted. While already compressed it looks great. So it might work OK. I'll check it all out later as I have to get ready to go to work in a bit.

 

[Prometheus]

It sounds like a good idea to include those examples, so I'm all for it if we can find a way to not dredge up any rights issues.

Congratulations on the employment, by the way.

 

[paulguy]

VLC can rip DVDs.

It's better to use "constant quality" variable bitrate modes over constant or average bitrate modes as well as" target filesize" modes are also less efficient, and also take much longer to encode.

Big Buck Bunny and An Elephant's Dream are a couple "open source" movies that you can probably try transcoding and not worry about rights.

 

[Karel Jansens]

Just a quick warning for those, like me, who have a stack of videos re-encoded for the Nokia N8x0 (to play with mplayer, not the included video player): While the videos play ok, the sound synch is invariably veering wildly off to either side.

I used to use Media Converter 2 (Media Converter 2), which is basically a Java frontend for mencoder, preloaded with settings for the -- highly optimised -- mplayer for Maemo.

It's a pity, really, because it produced quite viewable clips of reasonable compactness (400x240 does scale and watch well on a 800x480 screen, because of the simple pixel doubling)

 

[Poem58]

Thanks Paulguy for the suggestion of Big Buck Bunny. If a suitable format is available that should do nicely.

And thanks Karl for the warning, however could you possibly tell us what format you used for encoding? This way we can test and see if there are any problems on the Pandora. Maybe if you have an email attachment size clip or could upload a clip to PM Prometheus so she can test and report.

I know there are a lot of people who like to use variable bitrates for audio, however I have found that in general this will be the issue that is the most easily solved that causes out of sync problems. Most every player I have even had go out of sync was easily corrected when I re-encoded the audio to a constant bitrate.

Sorry I had no results for the weekend. Handbrake kept crashing on me saying that it could not encode a 320x240 video in mp4 with 96kbps audio in 10MB. Something of which I am certain is doable with Divx with decently watchable results. But then again, Handbrake was crashing at nearly everything I did. I found I had to keep the activity window open to make anything encode. Strangely while the 320x240 clip was considered by Handbrake to be impossible, encoding the full size clip at higher settings at normal size worked, while creating an ugly file.

So I decided to go back to Fair Use Wizard, which appears to have added h.264 and the same supported devices as Handbrake to it's list. Never had that program crash, and I can use Virtualdub to re-encode and make clips for everything.

I could not get the board to load most of Saturday, then got caught in the Honeydew list for the rest of the weekend. Today I am making fresh spaghetti sauce out of a large batch of garden tomatoes I don't want to go bad. Hopefully, I can get some samples done up this week. Sorry for the delay.

 

[MichaelXX2]

Wouldn't a simpler alternative be just to buy a capture card and record the DVD? Or are we going for more legal/pure recordings here?

 

[Prometheus]

^ I must admit that I'm not quite sure how researching a suitable capture card for one's OS, going out and finding it or finding it online (and waiting for its arrival in that case), purchasing it, fitting it if your system is capable of having such a thing fitted (laptop user myself, so that's a no for me ), setting up the software, and, I presume, sitting through your DVD collection back-to-back, is a simpler alternative for ripping one's DVDs.

 

[MichaelXX2]

You know they make external USB capture cards, right? I'm assuming you're thinking of the internal ones where they have to attach it to the motherboard. I'm using an external one and I get great quality from it.

 

[WizardStan]

It takes 1:1 time to rip a DVD via capture method as you describe, during which time you can't really do anything else with your PC because if you bog down the CPU or hard drive too much, it'll just drop frames to keep up.
Ripping a DVD directly in general takes less time, and you don't have to worry about what it's doing because even if you do something to slow down the CPU or writes to hard drive, all it will do is slow down the encoding process. By encoding from file (as opposed to a stream) it can also take advantage of enhancements like two-pass encoding for superior quality. You can also do it two phase: first you decrypt the DVD to your hard drive, which takes very little time; then you re-encode it, which can take the greatest amount of time. The benefit there being that you can decrypt a bunch of DVDs to your hard drive requiring only a fraction of the actual DVD running time to do so, and then queue them up for re-encoding overnight. With the capture method you need to watch as each DVD finishes in order to put in the next one to copy it.
DVD ripping is almost definitely the easier of the two.

 

[paulguy]

Also, capturing it would still possibly leave you having to encode the incoming video in some way. The software may come with some such feature that has some preset encoding options, but most of the advice in this thread is about getting optimal quality as well as playback performance on the pandora, which your encoding software may not take one, the other or either in to account. Let's not forget digital->analog->digital losses as well as losses from reencoding at all since the pandora should play DVD video as-is, once ripped, decrypted and put on SD card, which someone may want to do if they have available space. As for legality, it's likely illegal either way. I'm kinda surprised the Macrovision protection doesn't produce a screwed up image on your capture as devices are somewhat required to respond in such a way to that signal and not try to display it correctly.