Ripping DVDs the DerekWare Way
I don't support nor condone piracy of music or movies. I do, however, feel that the spirit of fair-use laws allow me to watch a movie or listen to a CD in any way that I see fit, assuming I've purchased it. For example, if I buy a CD, I should be able to rip it to my PC and copy it to my iPod. The same is true of DVDs. There are many methods that exist for ripping and/or re-encoding your DVDs. This is just the one that works for me. I'm not going to give any details on how to make illegal copies of your DVDs nor how to distribute them. I'm only going to explain how to transfer the contents of a DVD to your hard-drive and re-encode it so that it's smaller while maintaining most of the original quality.
There are a number of tools and plugins that you'll need. I've included them all in a ZIP file.
Unzip dwdvd.zip to C:\Program Files\dwdvd. In the Install directory, you'll find some executables and a .REG file. Run Avisynth_256.exe, SetupDVDDecrypter_3.5.4.0.exe and WMEncoder.exe. After all three apps are installed, run DVDDecrypter.reg to set the options appropriately. DVD Shrink is optional, but I find it useful for various tasks. Play around with it.
Step 2: Setting Up the Working Directory and the Difference Between HD and SD
I do all my encoding in a single directory where I've dropped some shortcuts. It's just easier to keep everything in one place like that. Create a folder somewhere (I use C:\DVD because it's easy to type). I'm assuming you can create folders and shortcuts and other fancy computin' machine stuff like that. If not, stop reading and go watch TV. Within C:\DVD, create shortcuts to DVD Decrypter and ConvertDVD.cmd, which you'll find in the C:\Program Files\dwdvd directory. There's three files in there with similar names (ConvertDVD1.cmd and ConvertDVD_Settings.cmd). Ignore those other two and just make a shortcut to ConvertDVD.cmd. For now, you can also ignore all the other files in there. The only ones you really care about are DVD Decrypter and ConvertDVD.cmd. You can just as easily run DVD Decrypter from the Start menu. Both work equally well.
Important note: the shortcut to ConvertDVD.cmd needs to have its "Start in" path deleted and a /2 added to the command line. I dropped a premade shortcut into C:\Program Files\dwdvd for you, so you can just copy that to C:\DVD if you want. Just in case, here's what it should look like.
Once you've created the shortcuts, create two subdirectories: C:\DVD\HD and C:\DVD\SD. Those are the folders where you're going to store your ripped DVDs and where the encoder is going to drop the WMV files it creates. HD is for DVDs you want to encode in high quality (HD stands for high definition, but I'm sure you figured that out) and SD for for DVDs you want to encode in lower definition. The rule of thumb is that movies and TV shows with high production value should generally go into HD while run-of-the mill TV shows and cartoons should go into SD. The WMV files produced from DVDs ripped to the HD folder will be larger than those in the SD folder, but less obvious is that DVDs ripped to the SD directory will have their audio normalized, meaning that the loud parts won't be quite so loud and the quiet parts won't be quite so quiet. This is good for watching on a TV or laptop that isn't connected to a surround-sound receiver. I use SD primarily for TV shows that I've bought on DVD, such as Futurama, Family Guy and other educational shows.
Step 3: Ripping the DVD
The first thing you have to do is get the data off the DVD and onto your hard-drive in an unencrypted format. DVDs are made up of a series of files, each with their own internal structure. The important files are VOB files and IFO files. There are also BUP files on the disc, but those are just backup IFO files, so they can be ignored. VOB files contain the actual video data in MPEG2 form, while IFO files instruct a DVD player how to play back the movie. IFO files are what provide direction to the player as to what title corresponds to what VOB file, when to display menus, when to prohibit you from skipping the FBI warning, etc. For our purposes here, only the VOB files really matter.
DVDs are separated into a hierarchy of titles and chapters. All DVDs have at least one title and all titles have at least one chapter. Those titles and chapters are represented on the disc as VTSs and PGCs. I'm not going to bother explaining what each of those are, partly because I don't fully understand them. You only need to know that every title on the disc is represented by a PGC, but not all PGCs are titles. Got that? Just like chapters are children of titles, PGCs are children of VTSs.
I'll reiterate: you don't really need to understand all about VTSs and PGCs. The only reason I bring them up is because DVD Decrypter shows you the raw DVD structures and that's the tool you're going to use to rip your DVDs. You're going to have to have some limited understanding of what you're looking at in the UI.
DVD Decrypter is a powerful tool for getting data off your DVDs, but it's not exactly the friendliest piece of software ever made. Most really powerful software isn't. They tend to require you to learn a little bit about what you're doing before diving in. I'll try to explain just enough for you to get by without inundating you with a bunch of information you don't need. DVD Decrypter can rip a DVD in three different modes: File, IFO and ISO. File mode simply takes the files off the DVD in exactly the same way they're stored on it, decrypts them and drops them on your hard-drive. This is the simplest form of ripping: read file from disc, decrypt in memory, write file to drive. Cake, right? This isn't the mode we're going to use. ISO mode is used for creating a burnable image of the DVD. Again, not the mode we're going to use. IFO mode parses the IFO files on the disc in the same way a DVD player would and splits the data into a hierarchy of VTSs and PGCs. The reason we use IFO mode is because it allows us to isolate the main title and get just that. We're not going to get any of the menus or extras -- just the main movie.
Insert a DVD and start DVD Decrypter. Select the drive with your disc in it in the drop-down. You'll notice not only that DVD Decrypter shows the heirarchy of VTSs and their PGCs, but also that it automatically highlighted one of them. In IFO mode, DVD Decrypter will automatically select the longest title because it assumes that's the main title. That's not always true, but it usually is. You're somewhat on your own if you have to manually determine which PGC to rip. You should be able to tell based on the length of the PGC, which is 2:58:08 in my example.
Optionally, you can click on the Stream Processing tab to select which parts of the title we actually want to copy. DVD Decrypter has a number of powerful options when it comes to how and what you want to rip. In this case, we're going to rip just a single title (the main movie) and have DVD Decrypter demux (demultiplex, a standard multimedia term for splitting a blob of data that contains multiple streams, such as audio, video and subtitle data interleaved together into a single file) the audio and video streams. Video will be saved as a .M2V file while audio will be saved as a .AC3 file. The DVD in my example has Dolby Digital audio, but DTS and LPCM are also supported. DTS audio will be saved as a .DTS file while LPCM will be saved as a .WAV file.
You'll notice that DVD Decrypter has automatically selected the video and all audio streams. You really only want one video and one audio file created, so you'll need to manually uncheck alternate languages or formats you don't want.
In this example, the DVD has both English and French audio tracks. Since it's unlikely that I want to listen to Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci dubbed into French, I've unselected the French audio track. If you fail to do this, DVD Decrypter will create multiple audio files but my encoder will attempt to select the right one, which will always be English. I'm assuming you speak English.
Many DVDs will have both 6-channel and 2-channel English audio tracks available. The encoder will automatically pick the highest quality English audio track, but you can manually unselect the 6-channel tracks if you want to use the 2-channel track instead. Just like I unselected French in this example, you could uncheck the "6ch" tracks and leave only the "2ch" tracks selected if you want.
Like I said above, this is all optional. If you don't do anything in the Stream Processing tab, DerekWare DVD will Do The Right Thing ™.
OK, now we're ready to start copying. Click the big ol' copy button at the bottom and select your output directory. Use C:\DVD\HD\Casino (or whatever your movie's name is). Let it churn away for as long as it takes. When it's done, it'll play a happy little tune to congratulate you. It's OK if you want to dance or sing along. I won't judge you.
You now have a DVD ripped to your hard drive. It's not really useful in its current form, but congratulations nonetheless. You've only ripped one so far, but you can actually rip as many as you want before you start the encode process. Ripping is interactive and reasonably quick, but encoding is slow. So, to help keep you from hating me, I've made the encode process such that it can encode a whole list of movies, one after another without you doing anything. You can actually start the encoder and then keep ripping other DVDs if you want. ConvertDVD.cmd will notice that you've added more files to C:\DVD and will keep going until they're all done.
I've had a number of problems with the two encoders that Microsoft ships. One is a graphical tool creatively named Windows Media Encoder. It's a great tool, but it and its command-line equivalent (wmcmd.vbs) both have one huge limitation that prevented me from using it for this purpose. I won't go into the technical details here, but you're welcome to buy me a drink or twelve and I'll tell you all about it. Being a nerd, I refused to stand for this and I wrote my own encoder. It's called dwWMEnc and you'll find it in C:\Program Files\dwdvd, along with everything else. You won't need to run it directly, but if you want to stare at it for a while and reflect on my awesomeness, that's where you'll find it.
If you open C:\DVD and double-click the shortcut you created to ConvertDVD.cmd, the encoding process will start. Because of the /2 on the command-line that I mentioned above, it's going to run in two-pass mode. The process of encoding the video is really multiple steps, the first of which is preprocessing the ripped DVD with a tool called DGIndex. As soon as you run ConvertDVD.cmd, assuming everything worked, you'll see a DGIndex window appear on your taskbar. It will run for a few minutes (probably around 10 to 15 depending on the speed of your computer and the length of the movie). While it does this, your hard drive is going to churn quite a bit. In order to get all that done up front, I wrote ConvertDVD.cmd so that it will run DGIndex on all your ripped DVDs first, then go back and encode them. That way, all the intensive work is done up front and your computer isn't constantly going from fast to slow when DGIndex pops up and runs. If you want to run in single-pass mode (I'm not sure why you would, but hey, it's your life), just remove the /2 from the command-line of the shortcut.
While your DVDs are being encoded, you're going to see a bunch of data in the ConvertDVD.cmd window, most of which won't be that interesting (until something goes wrong). The one thing that is interesting is the progress counter you'll see at the bottom. This will give you some indication of when each DVD is going to be finished. Eventually, you're going to see the very poetic text 'Press any key to continue...." When you see that, give yourself a high-five because you're done.
The WMV files that are created will be in the HD and SD directories and will have the same name as the folder you ripped the DVD into. Using my example, ripping a DVD to C:\DVD\HD\Casino would produce C:\DVD\HD\Casino.wmv.
Information for Nerds: Aspect Ratio
Film comes in all kinds of sizes and each one creates a different aspect ratio. Aspect ratio represents the difference between the size of the film's width and height. For instance, a 16x9 picture has an aspect ratio of 1.78 (16/9=1.7777778). A 4x3 picture has an aspect ratio of 1.3 (4/3=1.3333333). All DVDs use the dimensions 720x480 (720/480=1.5).
Most people know what letterboxing is, even if they don't know the name. It's when the aspect ratio of the source material is maintained on another medium by putting a black border around the video. If the original aspect ratio was higher than 1.5, as it often is in the case with film, horizontal bars are placed above and below the picture so that the original aspect ratio can be preserved without having to chop off the ends of the film. Sometimes, vertical bars are used to letterbox (it's actually called pillarboxing when it's vertical) from 1.3 to 1.5. Since all DVDs use an aspect ratio of 1.5 but most film and TV does not, content is either cropped or letterboxed when it's transferred to DVD.
Anamorphic widescreen is a technique that was included in the DVD specification but was not used by DVDs for a few years. When a video stream is encoded in anamorphic mode, the video is first letterboxed or cropped to an aspect ratio of 1.78 (16x9) and then squished horizontally to a ratio of 1.5 (9x6 or 720x480). The result is that everyone gets a lot skinnier. Obviously, this would look horrible if you watched it without re-expanding the video back out to 1.78, so that's what DVD players do. The video files have a flag in them that specifies that the content is anamorphic and should be re-expanded before displaying. If you look at the back of some of your DVDs, you'll see that they specify that they are anamorphic. This is not a reliable way to determine if a DVD is anamorphic or not since not all of them list it. Most newer DVDs are anamorphic and most older ones are not. What constitutes "old?" I have no idea.
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Pixel aspect ratio (PAR) is the way that video players know how to properly display anamorphic content. PAR uses a numerator and denominator to instruct the player how to recalculate the width of the video. The height remains the same. Widescreen DVD content should be displayed at 853.3x480 (which is actually rounded to 854 or 852) but is encoded as 720x480. The PAR specifies the values that the source width should be multiplied by, then divided by in order to achieve the proper display aspect ratio (DAR). The PAR is stored as two values instead of a decimal because the calculations can be done more exactly that way. For example, 0.33 is less accurate than 1/3. The PAR that we use to display anamorphic DVDs is 32:27. 720 x 32 / 27 = 853.33.
ConvertDVD.cmd automatically detects whether the DVD is anamorphic and tells the encoder (dwWMEnc) to set the PAR to 32:27 if it is. On most video players, you should see the video displayed properly because the player understands PAR. Some really crappy players won't. Don't use those.
Additionally, ConvertDVD.cmd uses a tool to detect the letterboxing in the video and remove it. This means that you won't actually be encoding black bars into your video. Instead, the bars are cropped out and the output video size becomes something other than 720x480. This saves space but more importantly, it prevents a nasty visual artifact on the TV. In a fun little twist, black isn't black. There's actually lots of shades of black. The version of black that would be encoded into the video and the version of black that your TV uses when it does its own letterboxing aren't the same. If you were to watch a widescreen movie on a standard TV, you could end up with dual letterboxing, horizontal from the DVD and vertical from the TV. If you're like me (God willing, you're not), you'd actually notice that they're not the same shade of black and it would cause you to drink out of anger, which is not a good reason one should drink. Alcohol doesn't deserve to be treated like that.
The end result is that your video will still be properly letterboxed, but it'll be done just by the TV. You won't have any black bars taking up space in the WMV file or making you abuse your liver.
That's it. That's the basics for you. There's a bunch of information I left out because, if my tools work properly, you shouldn't need to know them. Even so, feel free to play around with the tools. If you want to have some fun, look at one of the AVS files that ConvertDVD.cmd creates in the folders where you ripped your DVDs. AVISynth is an incredible tool and it's responsible for a lot of the work the encoder relies on. If you have any questions, well... you're pretty much on your own. I have no intention of helping any of you. I put this page together for my friends who have been bugging me to share this painfully acquired information. If you're not one of my friends, caveat emptor.
