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Is there a way to rip DVDs without losing quality

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DeadSeaSquirrels

Senior member
We're in the 21st century and it would be nice to just have all my DVDs on one server without having all my DVDs taking up space on my book case. Is there a way to store/rip DVDs and save the data on my harddrive - or my future giant hard drive. I mean you can get 500GB SATA drives for a few hundred, this seems more reasonable to me.
 
Um... you could always just make a 1:1 copy of the DVD. You don't need to re-encode or whatever if you just want to keep the original. Each DVD will run you anywhere from 4+ gigs to 9+ gigs. You could do it the sloppy way by copying the DVD contents to your hard drive in Windows Explorer or just use DVDshrink and make full backups to your HD (or cut the extra garbage you don't want, just keep main movie video quality at 100%). DVDshrink is free so check it out - Google it.

The above method would still loose some quality and is a long process. Completely re-encoding a movie takes time. Normally when I want to shrink a DVD to a single disc, I do a 6pass VBR re-encode but this takes all nights. Like I said, if using your hard drive is not a concern, just make basic 1:1 copies of the DVD.
 
If you don't encode, then the resultant files will have the exact same image as the dvds. If you use any sort of re-encoding, you will lose some image quality.
 
Originally posted by: zephyrprime
If you don't encode, then the resultant files will have the exact same image as the dvds. If you use any sort of re-encoding, you will lose some image quality.
Click to expand...

In theory, it's possible to re-encode it to a higher-bitrate format and not lose anything. As a trivial example, you could double the horizontal and vertical resolution of the video frames and then save it to a lossless format (or in an editing format that stored the raw frames, etc.)

In practice, nobody would ever do this, since it would just waste a lot of time and not really accomplish anything. 😛

But yes, you can just rip the MPEG2 streams. If you don't compress or recode them, you will have the exact same data that is on the DVD, and so you can play it back at the same quality.
 
DVD-RB + CCE can keep quality virtually identical to original even at 50%.
Takes a couple hours depending on CPU though...
 
DVD Shrink, don't reencode, but strip out all of the extras and audio tracks that aren't DTS (or the best on the disc).
 
Listen man, this is all you need, DVD-Fab Platinum (well worth the price). You don't need to rip the entire DVD, just the movie. Bascially you'll have the EXACT same quality on your hard drive and you won't have to wait through the irritating warnings and previews.
 
ah...I'm going to have to go through this post slowly. I don't have that much concern about hard drive space. If the movie takes up 10 GB then so be it. But if by stripping out crap I don't want, like specials (though some specials I do want, that's the problem), and extra features will greatly reduce the size of the file it might be worth it. Like I said, right now with a terabyte external drive going for a little more than $500, and an internal SATA 500GB going for $169, space is not really a problem. Encoding and recoding is a problem.

I also didn't know you could just copy a file over and then play it from the hard drive directly. I guess I haven't really investigated the possibilities much. Thanks for all the help. If anybody has any more suggestions feel free to add.
 
Originally posted by: DeadSeaSquirrels
ah...I'm going to have to go through this post slowly. I don't have that much concern about hard drive space. If the movie takes up 10 GB then so be it. But if by stripping out crap I don't want, like specials (though some specials I do want, that's the problem), and extra features will greatly reduce the size of the file it might be worth it. Like I said, right now with a terabyte external drive going for a little more than $500, and an internal SATA 500GB going for $169, space is not really a problem. Encoding and recoding is a problem.

I also didn't know you could just copy a file over and then play it from the hard drive directly. I guess I haven't really investigated the possibilities much. Thanks for all the help. If anybody has any more suggestions feel free to add.
Click to expand...

Just ripping the movie opposed to the whole disc saves QUITE a bit of space. You're talking about <5GB instead of possibly 8GB+. And let me tell you, if you think 1TB or even 2 or 3TB is a lot of hard drive space, bust out the calculator and compare how many 5GB movies you can store compared to 8GB movies. If you have a large DVD collection, that space will be eaten up FAST.

Some people here have suggested DVDShrink. While DVDShrink was GREAT when it was still being developed, it has almost become obsolete now. You may start having some issues with shrinking (stripping out content) with DVDShrink with newer movies. But if you want something free, give it a shot. However, if you want a sure fire, all-in-one solution, get DVD-Fab Platinum. I LOVE it and I used DVDShrink for the longest time.

As for playing the movie after its ripped, just set DVDShrink/DVD-Fab to output to an ISO. You'll have a nice DVD image you can mount with Daemon Tools and play through PowerDVD (or whatever DVD software player you'd like), or you can have a machine running Windows Media Center that will mount and play the ISO automatically from your server on your network. There's other ways of playing the ISO too, but I just named a couple. The toughest part though is just getting it ripped, and it's not even tough. It's actually pretty easy.
 
Depends on what you mean by "not losing quality." If you mean not being able to tell the difference, then I would suggest encoding with x264 at a relatively high bitrate (something line 2500-3000 Kb/s) with all the features enabled. It's not lossless of course, but you shouldn't be able to tell the difference.
 
Rip the main movie with DVD Shrink, and save it to the hard drive. You'll get the VIDEO_TS folder with VIDEO_TS.IFO all the VOBs, and you can play it on your computer with a DVD player such as PowerDVD.

With no compression, it will be the same size as the movie was on the DVD... 4-8 gb.
 
Originally posted by: DeadSeaSquirrels
We're in the 21st century and it would be nice to just have all my DVDs on one server without having all my DVDs taking up space on my book case. Is there a way to store/rip DVDs and save the data on my harddrive - or my future giant hard drive. I mean you can get 500GB SATA drives for a few hundred, this seems more reasonable to me.
Click to expand...

if you want 100% 1:1 copy from DVD...then just copy the .VOB files from DVD somewhere.....and then rename the .VOB to .MPG. Because DVDs are in MPEG format anmd then you have an 1:1 copy of what was on the DVD with no conversion whatsoever.

You might need dvdripper or similiar because many DVDs are protected.
 
Use DVDshrink or a combination of DVD-Fab and DVDShrink (in case DVDShrink cannot rip the DVD, then use DVD-FAB to rip the entire DVD, and then use DVDShrink to re-author). Those two programs should provide all you need.

For playback, I recommend VideoLAN, which is a great no-nonsense player, and has great features such as auto-cropping movies to fit full screen, no matter what screen aspect ratio you have.
 
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