Ripping DVDs

 

This is just a small FAQ on ripping DVDs, with an extra section on adding subs for all those anime fans out there.  Again, I am no expert but it works fine for me.  It doesn’t look pretty and beautiful with flower pictures and all that so sorry in advance to all those whose eyes will be burned out by white and black colours.  Note that all the programs listed below are Freeware (ie free!!!!) except the player that I personally use is commercial, but you can easily get a freeware player by following the link provided.

 

Ripping DVDs is a 3 step process

 

  1. Getting the DVD data structure to the hard drive.
  2. Creating a Fake AVI to prepare for encoding
  3. Encoding.

 

You need a DVD drive in your computer of course.  And a spare 10 gig.

 

You will need the following programs

VirtualDub

SmartRipper (Note – I can’t direct link to ripping programs, the MPAA will rip me to shreds.  You will need to find you own.  Go to www.divx-digest.com to look for ripping programs or do a google search)

DVD2AVI

VFAPI

PowerDVD (or any old DVD playing program will do)

 

(Divx-digest is good for all these programs.  www.afterdawn.com is also good.  You can also just do a plain old google search for stuff anyway.)

 

You will need the following codecs -

Divx (or xvid) for video

MP3 codec (from Radium or the Fraunhofer IIS will do) for audio.  Its important to get the right mp3 codec or the audio will suck.

 

(Note – the hyperlink for the codecs goes to Divx-Digest.  It has a crapload of codecs for you to pick from)

 

Step 1 – Ripping

 

Basically, this step involves accessing the DVD and grabbing the data off it.  Of course, a little thing called ‘security features’ locks the files to prevent people doing that.  So we need a program to get the data off.  I use Smartripper for that.  Start the program with the DVD in the drive and see if it will access the DVD.  If it does, yay, rip the files to the hard drive.  If it doesn’t, we can trick the DVD into opening up for us. 

 

 

Start a DVD player like ‘PowerDVD’ so that it starts playing files from the DVD.  This opens the DVD files for the ripper program.  While the player is going, switch applications (ALT-TAB) out of the player and restart Smartripper and voila, the files are now all available for ripping!  Once it says that the Authentification process is successful, you can stop the player.

 

Switch to the files section.  There will be a whole lot of Vob files and ifo files.  Vob files are where the audio and video are.  Ifo files is the information.  I just rip the entire DVD to the hard drive. 

 

 

Select all the files, go to the bottom, select where you want the files to go to and rip.  Should take about 30 minutes. If you don’t turn the player off like I said, it will take 12 hours (ie turn off the player!)

 

Sidenote – DVD structure

 

When ripping, I primarily focus on dealing with Vobs and ifos.  Note that if you are ripping a DVD with many episodes, there are many types of VOB files which denote either an episode or some other video feed (promos, omakes, etc).  The large files (usually about 1.5 gig or over) are the episodes.  If you are ripping a whole movie, the files are all in a row starting with names like VTS_01_0.VOB up to VTS_01_8.VOB.  Note that Hong Kong pirate DVDs don’t usually split up episodes, they just put all the episodes in one long video feed because they are lazy.  Why is this important?  Because you have to find the files with what you want to encode, otherwise you can make a pretty encode of the starting menu animation instead of the actual movie.  It does involve some guesswork I’m afraid.  Use DVD2AVI to check out the rows of Vobs you want.

 

Step 2 – Creating a Fake AVI

 

I bet you want to know what I mean by Fake AVI.  You want to encode the file into another divx / xvid right?  We are going to use VirtualDub to do that, which is a great encoding program, but it doesn’t read DVDs.  What we are going to do is create an AVI file which uses the DVD as the source video!  This is where DVD2AVI comes in useful.  Open up DVD2AVI and get it to open the DVD files on the hard drive. It will come up with a file list. 

 

 

It usually selects all the vobs in the directory. Delete the vobs you will not be using (this is where you can preview the vobs you want to encode).  One you have done that….Save the project! (Do not save the avi!)

 

 

“Hey wait a second, why don’t we just encode with this program?” you say?  Because the program sucks.  It doesn’t have enough flexibility to create a finished polished product.  We just want the info for now.

 

DVD2AVI will now create a .d2v file in your directory with the vob files, and it will rip out the raw wav audio from the vobs.  Now to create the Fake AVI!  Open up VFAPI now.  You will want to open that d2v file with this program and save the file as an avi.  Make sure that the two boxes are ticked as shown below!  Now save!

 

 

You have now created a FAKE avi file!  Ready for the next step?

 

Step 3 - Encoding

 

Open up VirtualDub.  Open the Fake AVI through VirtualDub.  See why the Fake AVI is so great now?  We are using the DVD as the video source, and you couldn’t ask for better than that!  You can use the bottom bar to go through the video feed.  Only the vobs that you selected and saved in the DVD2AVI project file are included here.  Anyway, lets add the video in.

 

Audio –

Go to the Audio drop down menu.  Three thing to do here!

1.                  WAV Audio.  Select the Wav created from the DVD2AVI program.  Should be something like “AC3 T01 2_0ch 448Kbps 48KHz.wav”.

2.                  Full processing mode.  We are going to convert that HUGE wav file into something smaller.

3.                  Compression.  Select MPEG Layer-3 and choose the format you want.  I usually go for 128 kbit 48,000 Hz Stereo.  Psycho audio freaks usually go for the one at the top, but that just adds more size to your AVI file that I don’t really thing you need.  (By the way, some people get away with 96 kbits)

 

Well that’s audio.

 

Video –

Go to the Video drop down menu.  We have 2 places to visit here.  Full Processing mode is set as a default, so we don’t need to select that.

 

 

 

1                    Compression.  Select the codec you want and then select the bitrate to encode stuff into.  What bitrate to use?  Well, now comes the time where you have to make a size vs quality trade off.  Obviously you could create a 20 minute episode that fit 700 meg quite easily.  Or you could create a very small file.  I suggest you think about the size of the file you want and download a bitrate calculator from somewhere and input the actual running time of the file and your projected file size.  Or you can just let the file encode and see what size it ends up at.  At the moment, I am encoding a 25 minute episode and I want it to end up at 175 meg.  By putting that through the bitrate calculator, it tells me to use 830 Khz for encoding.  Play around a bit.

2                    Filters.  Ah yes, filters.  These are additional items you can use to make the video more pretty.  Here are some filters you MUST use –

Deinterlace – Leave it on blend.  Press OK.

Rezize – Basically the default for DVD video is 720 x 480, which is damn big.  You can decide what size you want to reduce it to with this filter.  The default is 320x240 but I usually use 512x384.  Just make sure that the Filter Mode (the drop down menu below the is Bilinear!  I think you have to make sure that no matter what size you choose, it must be in multiples of 8.

Optionals

Null transform – You can crop the edges off the video with this.  Select this filter and then select cropping from the filter menu to get rid of those damn black bars.  If you want to get rid of them of course.

 

 

OK, we are all done.  Now, go to file and “Save as AVI”!  Encoding time will vary, so leave it on overnight or something.  Come back later and see the fruits of your labor. 

 

Side note – Previews.

If you want a quick preview, just stop the encoding after a few minutes and check out the avi file.  You can still play it without having finished the encoding process as VirtualDub will just slap on an index for players to view it with.  This is a good opportunity to check out if the audio is fine, if the video codec is working etc.  For tricky people who want to make sure that a particular part of the avi will show a particular scene fine (ie lots of movement and action and you want to make sure there are no or minimal artifacts (is blocks) or that the subs are timed ok and the audio is in sync with the video) use the Edit drop down menu (the 2nd menu) in Virtualdub and use the Home and End keys to choose the start of a selection of the file from the bar down the bottom and press delete to remove it. Use the mouse to slide the bar left and right, and the arrow keys for fine tuning.  Then encode that particular part.  Happy with how it went and you want to do the whole file now?  Go back to File – Open and just re-open the Fake AVI file.  All your video and audio settings will remain the same, all you have done is opened up the full length of the  avi file for encoding again!

 

Japanese audio with subtitles?

 

You will need

Avery Lee’s SSA subtitle filter add-on

SubStation Alpha

Subrip (or try here)

SRT to SSA converter

 

I’ll keep this short and re-edit it later if someone wants me to.

 

  1. Use DVD2AVI to reselect the Audio channels in the avi IF the default language stream is English.  Re-save the d2v file and continue on to make the Fake AVI file.

 

 

  1. Use Subrip to open the Vob file.  Select the correct language stream you want to rip.  Subrip only does English subtitles.  Tell subrip the letters that each character represents.
  2. When finished, go to corrections – Post OCR corrections as follow.  Press OK.  Save Srt file.

 

 

  1. Rename Srt as a .doc file.  Time to edit the subs if you want to!  Open in Word.  Let it do some spell checking for incorrectly spelled words.  Don’t let it correct the sentence structures, only misspelled words.  Its up to you to fix sentences if you want to.  If you have a HK DVD, search for the ads in the subtitles and replace them with a couple of spaces so there is no ad but there are spaces so it looks to the subtitling programs later that there is actually something there.
  2. Rename the .doc back to an .srt file.
  3. Open up SRT to SSA convertor.  Use the settings it has, don’t bother changing them.  They are the default settings, but we will be able to change them later.  Let it run.
  4. Open up the ssa file in SubStation Alpha.  It is a very powerful tool.  I am no SubStation Alpha expert, but I know some things.   Select the first line of the subs, scroll to the bottom, press shift and left click on the last line and you should have all the lines selected (Just select all the lines!).  Click on style override (It’s a button up near the top right).  Here, I use the Arial font – Bold - 36 points, and I use white as my colour of choice for subtitles.  Save the SSA.
  5. Open up VirtualDub.  Hopefully you will have put Avery Lee’s subtitle filter in the ‘filter’ directory of the VirtualDub program so lets add the filter (you know the drill) called ‘subtitler’ and open up the SSA file you just made.  You don’t need to change any settings here.  You can preview the subs in this filter window here so you can see how they look.  Press OK.

 

Well that’s it.  If the timing is off on the subtitles (ie the character speaks and the subtitles are too early or late), you will need to change the timing. Go back and re-open the SSA file in SubStation Alpha.  Go to the Timing drop-down menu and select “Shift Times”.  If the subs are too late (character speaks, then subs appear) you will need to “shift backwards” by a particular time.  Here is where your personal judgment will need to apply on what time to move things around by.

 

The END!

 

Note – This is my FAQ and if you want to use it somewhere else, ASK me first.  I may or may not grant permission but if I do, you will credit me.  If you find it anywhere else, please email me.