(The Downton Abbey DVDs complicated matters further: In addition to three hour-long episodes per disc, there is a first title video that is all three episodes in one file. Each disc typically has multiple shows, so you will need to select each in the Titles drop-down in turn, make whatever configuration changes (like captions/subtitles) and then click Add to Queue to add that show to the ripping queue. If you’re just ripping the one video, click Start and Handbrake will do its thing. This may require a bit of experimentation. Possibilities range from nothing (increasingly uncommon) to hard-coded “VobSub”-type subtitles and “soft captions” which can be enabled and disabled on the fly by most common video players these days. If you want captions/subtitles, use the Subtitles tab to examine what’s available. Generally speaking, the movie you want is the longest of the available videos. Ripping a DVD movie is straightforward: You select Source and then the disc, and after Handbrake has analyzed the disc, you can examine the videos in the Title drop-down. And they stream nicely from my home server to the Roku or Amazon Fire TV using Plex too. This will provide a reasonably-sized, reasonable quality version of the video(s) in a form that works and looks great on all modern devices, including Windows PCs and tablets and Windows Phones. Your needs may vary, but I find that the stock “Universal” preset works well for DVD movies and TV shows. And I ripped them to H.264/MP4 with Handbrake. If I could have purchased these shows in HD electronically, I would have.īut I bought the DVD versions. One of the nice things about that decryption technology is that it also removes the region encoding that would normally make watching an international DVD disc hard or impossible. So these days, my DVD purchases are similar to my music CD purchases, rare events and related to content that I simply cannot get elsewhere.įor example: my two most recent DVD purchases were the latest season of Rick Steves’ Europe (the 2015 – 2016 season), which is not available in Blu-Ray for some reason, and the UK version of Downton Abbey Season 5, which I bought as a Christmas present for my wife she loves the show and we power-watch it before it airs in the US (which it is doing right now, on PBS). For starters, DVDs provide standard definition video (720 x 480 or less for US discs) that doesn’t hold up well against the HD streaming quality at services like iTunes, Netflix or Amazon Prime Video. My own need for DVD ripping has gone down a lot over the years. I’ve tried this solution with a few recent DVDs and it’s worked well. You can download the latest version of this standalone DLL file from the VideoLAN web site just copy it into the Handbrake directory (C:\Program Files\Handbrake by default) and you should be good to go. (The HD version that also decrypts Blu-Ray is even more expensive at about $70 to $135).įortunately, there is a free decryption solution called libdvdcss. And while I do still use the HD version of this software, it’s gotten a bit too expensive to recommend to anyone without a huge DVD collection: You will pay about $46 for one year of updates or up to $78 for a lifetime. Years ago I paid for a software utility called SlySoft AnyDVD to handle the copy protection removal, or decryption. The software is free, easy to use, and infinitely configurable if you want to over-think it. I use and recommend Handbrake for ripping DVDs. And I do not do so personally: I’ve purchased all of the DVDs I’ve ripped, and they’re still here at home stored in the basement next to my CD collection, in boxes. Note: In the event this isn’t patently obvious, I am not advocating that anyone steal content, let alone distribute or share it. In addition to a DVD drive attached to your PC (obviously), you need two pieces of software: A utility that can recognize the videos found on a DVD and “rip” (copy) them into popular video formats like H.264/MP4, and a decryption utility that can remove the copy protection found on commercial DVD discs, a “fair use” practice that I feel is legal (in the US) for personal use cases. So here’s how I rip DVD movies and TV shows using free software. While the world has clearly moved on to HD video, many of us still have massive DVD collections and would like to make this content available digitally so that it can be enjoyed on mobile devices and streamed to screens around the home via Plex or similar solutions.
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