by Christopher Breen, Macworld.com Nov 10, 2011 10:00 am
The weekly Macworld Video returns! Starting this week, Macworld’s editors will provide a helpful video compatible not only with your web browser, but also your iOS device. In this specific video I show you how to use DVD Player to determine which is the correct main title to rip for the DVDs you own. Enjoy.
• Format: MPEG-4/H.264
• Resolution: 480 x 272 (iPhone & iPod compatible)
• Size: 3 MB
• Length: 1 minute, 53 seconds
Show Notes
[Editor’s note: The MPAA and most media companies argue that you can’t legally copy or convert commercial DVDs for any reason. We (and others) think that, if you own a DVD, you should be able to override its copy protection to make a backup copy or to convert its content for viewing on other devices. Currently, the law isn’t entirely clear one way or the other. So our advice is: If you don’t own it, don’t do it. If you do own it, think before you rip.]
I discuss two utilities in this video. HandBrake and VLC. Go get ’em. DVD Player can be found in your Mac’s Applications folder.
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Thursday, November 10, 2011
Ripping the correct DVD title with HandBrake | Macworld
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
How to Get Your DVDs Onto Your iOS Devices via maketecheasier.com
Have you ever wanted to watch a movie on your iOS device, but not wanting to spend money in the iTunes Store because you already own the DVD? Maybe you just don’t know the best way to encode your movies to not just work on your iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, but also to have them look pretty good. While Apple doesn’t really provide any easy way for you to do this, with this simple tutorial (and a couple extra apps), you’ll be able to view your DVDs on any iOS device. Keep reading and follow these instructions to help you save money and enjoy your favorite movies on the go!
Software Downloads
The first and most important step to this process is to download the necessary software. You’re going to need two separate programs – Mac The Ripper and iSquint. Bascially, Mac The Ripper rips, or extracts, DVDs to your hard drive, and iSquint converts the video to be compatible with iOS devices. Mac The Ripper can be downloaded here and iSquint can be downloaded here.
Note: You can also use Handbrake to do rip your DVD into iOS compatible format. The only issue is that Handbrake does not support copy-protected DVDs while Mac The Ripper does.
Using Mac The Ripper
The first step is to insert the DVD of your choice into the Mac. Open Mac The Ripper. It will read and recognize the disc in your DVD drivet. Now you must click on the “Mode” option and change the “Full Disc Extraction” option to “Title Only Extraction”. Below these options, you want to make sure you have selected the title that is the longest and says “(MF)” or main feature. After you’ve completed this, you can return to the Disc tab and press GO!. In some cases, the program might prompt you to select a RCE Region. If it does, select RCE 1 and then click GO!. Finally, choose a location to save the file and let Mac The Ripper do its job. It will take some time.
Using iSquint
Once the DVD has been ripped, you can remove the movie and close Mac The Ripper altogether. Now open the file that was created, go into the “Video_TS” file, and drag the item into iSquint. Be sure that you have selected the “Optimize for iPod” option and have “H.264 Encoding” enabled. If you want to, you can select “Add to iTunes”. In my experience, this has given me a few problems, so you might want to avoid it. Personally, I disable it and just drag the file into iTunes manually when iSquint has finished. Choose the location for the movie to be saved in and click Start to begin the conversion process. Now all you have to do is wait until the file is converted into an iOS compatible video.
Wrap-Up
Finally, once iSquint finishes, open up iTunes and find the new video file. Click and drag it into your iTunes library and add it to your iOS device just like you would for any other video. Now that you’ve added the movie go ahead and quit iSquint and go enjoy it on-the-go with your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad!
Do you know any other ways to convert videos? Better, faster ways maybe? Give us all your comments below!
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Decrypt and Copy DVDs to Your Hard Drive Without Ripping
Have you ever wanted to make backup copies of your DVDs but didn’t want to mess with confusing DVD ripping software? Today, we’ll look at drop dead simple method to decrypt DVDs on the fly with DVD43 so you can easily copy them to your hard drive.
Note: Unfortunately, DVD43 runs only on Windows 32-bit systems.
Installation and Setup
Download and install DVD43. You can find the installation below.
When the install is finished you’ll be prompted to restart your PC.
DVD43 runs in the system tray at startup. When idle, the DVD43 icon is yellow with a straight face.
Insert your DVD into your optical drive. While DVD43 is searching for the encryption keys, the system tray icon will appear as a devilish smiley face. This process usually takes just a few seconds, but may occasionally take longer.
DVD43 will detect the disc and the system try icon should turn into a green smiley face.
Now just browse your DVD directory and simply copy the Video TS file from the DVD to your hard drive. You may find other directories, such as AUDIO_TS, but those folders and files can be ignored.
Once it‘s copied to your hard drive you can play it in your favorite media player. In VLC, select Media > Open Folder and browse for the VIDEO TS folder.
Now you can enjoy the full DVD experience with menus and extra features.
If you don’t want DVD43 running in the system tray all the time, right click on the icon and select Exit when you aren’t using it.
Conclusion
Although DVD43 will work in most cases, it may be unable to break newer protections when they are initially released. For those with 64-bit operating systems, or if you want to see how to play VIDEO_TS folders in some other media players, you may want to check out our earlier post on Ripping a DVD to your Hard Drive using DVDFab HD Decrypter. Of course you can also turn the DVD files into an ISO as well.
Monday, June 28, 2010
How to Rip a DVD to your Hard Drive and Play it on your PC
Are you looking to for a way to play your media DVDs without rifling through your collection and swapping discs? Today we’ll take a look at ripping a DVD to your hard drive and playing it with some popular media players.
To rip our DVD we’ll use HD Decrypter which is the always free module of the DVDFab software suite. HD Decrypter will remove the copy protection from your DVD, and copy the contents of the DVD to your hard drive.
Note: You’ll get full access to all the options in DVDFab during the 30 trial period. HD Decrypter is always free.
Download and install DVDFab. You’ll find the download link below.
If prompted with a Windows Security dialog box, select Install.
When you run DVDFab for the first time, you’ll be met with a Welcome to DVDFab screen. You can select the Do not show again to skip this screen in the future and then click Start DVDFab.
Place your DVD into your optical drive. The application will take a few seconds to open the DVD source.
Before we get started with the ripping, we’re going to change a few settings. Select the green button at the top with the white check mark.
On the Common Settings window, select DVD to DVD on the left pane. For the Default output type, we’ll select DVD Folder. The default setting of DVD Writer is used for copying and burning a DVD and won’t work after the 30 day trial is over.
Tip: If you’re going to play your ripped DVD in the Windows Media Center native Movie Library, select Create dvdid.xml which can be used by Windows Media Center. This will allow WMC to pull cover art and metadata for your movie.
You can set your output directory by selecting General on the left pane of the Common Settings…
And then browsing for your preferred output directory. On Windows 7 the default output will be C:\Users\%username%\Documents\DVDFab\
If you’ve made the changes you’ll be prompted to restart the program. Click OK then open and close the application.
On the the main interface, make sure to select Full Disc on the left and Copy DVD-Video (VIDEO_TS folder), which should be selected by default.
Under navigation select Remove annoying PGCs to eliminate unwanted program chains like FBI warnings. You can also change the Volume Label by typing a name into text box. We recommend naming the Volume label the same as the movie title, but it’s not essential.
Note: For the Quality setting, once the 30 day trial has expired your only available option will be DVD9. During the 30 day trial you can select DVD5, which will (if needed) compress the output to a size that would fit a single layer DVD.
Click Start.
As the DVD is being ripped to your hard drive, you can follow the progress. Typical ripping time may be around 15 – 20 minutes, but will vary depending on your hardware and size of the disc.
When the process its finished you’ll be notified by the DVDFab dialog box. Click OK.
That’s it. Your rip is complete. Click Finish.
When your finished you’ll have a root folder containing a VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders. The AUDIO_TS folder, however, is really not needed and will probably just be an empty folder.
Now we’ll take a look at playing the DVD rip in a number of Windows applications.
Playback in VLC
VLC is a popular cross platform media player that can play virtually any media type and VIDEO_TS is no exception. Open VLC and select Media > Open Folder.
Select the folder that contains your VIDEO_TS directory and click OK.
Your DVD will open just as if you were playing it from the disc.
Playback in Boxee
Add the folder containing your DVD rip(s) to the My Movies library. For Boxee to recognize it and display covert art and movie info, make sure your root folder is named the same as the title of the movie or TV show you ripped. Check out our previous article for an in depth look at setting up movie folders and managing your movie collection in Boxee.
Select your DVD from the My Movies section, then select Local File…
…and enjoy your DVD rip.
Playback on Windows 7 Media Center
Add the root folder containing the VIDEO_TS folder and XML file (if you choose to create one when your ripped the DVD) to your WMC library. Your DVD rip will still play without the xml file, but you won’t have all the nice metadata.
Click play and video playback will begin just like the DVD.
Playback on Windows Media Player 12
It’s a tad trickier on WMP 12. Instead of opening a folder, which Media Player doesn’t support, we’ll open the VIDEO_TS.IFO file.
Media Player will begin playing.
Conclusion
Not only is ripping your DVD collection to a hard drive a nice way to enjoy them on your computer or media center PC, it is also a great way to create backups of your media. It’ll take up much more hard drive space than compressing them to MP4 or AVI files, but in return you’ll get the full DVD experience right from the hard drive without swapping discs.
You might want to check out our previous posts if you prefer to rip and convert DVDs to ISO images, or rip your DVD and compress it with x.264 codec.
Downloads
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Rip Audio CDs in Linux with Sound Juicer
There are a plethora of programs that can rip audio CDs on Linux, but very few are as simple as Sound Juicer. Sound Juicer is a GUI front-end for the command line only tool cdparanoia, but it adds quite features that make it worth a look.
Install Sound Juicer
Sound Juicer is not installed by default in a lot of distributions so it may need to be installed from the distribution’s software repository. Start by opening up the software manager that comes with your distribution.
Note: The screenshots show mintInstall that comes with Linux Mint 9.
Search for “sound-juicer” in the software manager. For some reason searching for “juicer” and “sound juicer” did not bring up any results so make sure you include the dash when searching.
Once you find the right program simply click install to download and install the latest version available in your repositories.
Launch Sound Juicer
Once the software is installed go back to the menu to open the program. In Linux Mint and Ubuntu, Sound Juicer shows up as “Audio CD Extractor”. Search for it in the mintMenu or in Ubuntu find it under Applications -> Sound & Video.
If there is no CD in the drive the program won’t have much to look at.
Once an audio CD is inserted Sound Juicer should automatically detect your CD and fill in the information for title, artist, year, and track information.
Sound Juicer connects to MusicBrainz to determine the CD information. If the CD cannot be found in the MusicBrainz database you will have the option to fill in the CD information manually and submit the album for future users.
Customizing CD Rips
If you want to use a different CD drive, change the music folder or naming of your ripped music, or change what format the music is ripped in, click on Edit -> Preferences.
Click on “Edit Profiles” to change advanced settings about how music is ripped. There are some ripping profiles installed by default and the profiles can easily be added or removed.
In Ubuntu, to enable the MP3 and AAC ripping you will need to install the restricted-extras package from the Synaptic Package Manager or it can be installed directly from FireFox using the Ubuntu community documentation.
Highlight one of the profiles and click “Edit” to change the name, description, and GStreamer command that runs to rip the music.
Once everything is set up, click “Extract” to begin ripping the CD. Depending on the settings, the CD will rip and eject as soon as it is done. Put in the next CD and the computer do all the work!
If you would like to keep up with Sound Juicer development or make a donation to the developer you can find the website here.
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