When I rip DVDs in Linux I normally rip them with meconder from dvd format to a divx. I get rid of menus, alternate audio, subtitles, etc. If you're looking for information on how to rip to a real dvd format then you might try finding info on one of the links. You'll find the way I use menconder bellow. Sometimes when I don't feel like optimizing and I'm lazy I might use dvd::rip. If you're using debian you can download many of these programs from the marillat repostitory. Check out my Debian Tips page.
Links
dvd::rip. A graphical perl program to rip dvds. Previews, cropping, options, etc.
MPlayer/MEncoder. The program to use to watch DVDs in Linux (and windows?). It comes with MEncoder, a command line tool to encode movies (i.e. rip dvds).
Transcode. A command line video manipulation tool. Modifies, encodes, decodes, filters, etc. Required by some of the other programs.
XviD video codec. Mpeg4 based and a replacement to DivX.
Quickrip. A simple QT based graphical dvd ripping program.
dmencoder is a web page that generates a script for mencoder to rip a dvd.
k3b is a cd/dvd burning tool with many features, including some of interest for dvds, vcds, etc.
- Libdvdcss - a library providing dvd decrypting functions. Required by transcode to read dvds correctly. Google for it. It's also part of the marillat debian repository as libdvdcss2.
K9Copy if you need to copy dvds.
How I do it using menconder
I use mencoder(mplayer) to play and encode my movies. I rescale the movie to the correct aspect ration so that some broken players don't have to deal with the "scale" variable. I normally get good results with 700MB (1 cd). For large or "complex" movies I use 1400MB (2 cds) to maintain quality.
- Watch part of the movie with mplayer, make sure you are getting the audio/chapter right.
mplayer -dvd 1
- Extract the movie from the dvd with mencoder
mencoder -dvd 1 -oac copy -ovc copy -o movie-rip.avi
- Get aspect ratio from movie with mecoder using cropdetect
- Calculate the scaling and cropping I want
- Encode (mencoder) with some good default options
mecoder -o movie-pass1.avi -oac ...
- Check movie-pass1, guesstimate the options for pass2 (size, audio)
- Encode pass 2 with new options
mecoder -o movie.avi -oac ...
- Enjoy movie
mplayer -fs movie.avi