Ripping DVD Movies to Computer

I am new to XBMC as well as media centers in general. Yesterday I downloaded XBMC and everything went fine and I wanted to begin adding DVD movies to my hard drive so that I could scan them into my movie library in XBMC. I am having trouble figuring out how to copy these movies onto my hard drive. I downloaded a couple of free programs that people had recommended to use (DVD Shrink, Handbrake, etc. ) but I am not really having any luck getting them to copy my dvd correctly. I set up a folder for it to copy the DVD to and when it was done, there were several .vob and ".ifo" (I think) files, but I couldn't really do anything with them. Any information would be appreciated

if you just want a copy of the dvd data then the vob's are the mpeg-2 video streams (ifo's are usually menu information)
consider ripping dvd's into iso's like so:
if you want to encode them into xvid's/ mkv's/ x264's, ... then you have to convert the dvd. consider mencoder which you would have to install thru apt-get (that means you have to ssh into your xbmc box or open a virtual terminal (ctrl-alt-f2) and use xbmc as username and pass)

I appreciate your reply. A lot of that is foreign language to me. Am I going to need to use one of those ripping software or are you telling me that I am able to do it without one of those ? When you gave that code, where is that used at ? Meaning, where would I enter that code into ?

BentleyJones Wrote:I appreciate your reply. A lot of that is foreign language to me. Am I going to need to use one of those ripping software or are you telling me that I am able to do it without one of those ? When you gave that code, where is that used at ? Meaning, where would I enter that code into ?

That's Linux code. I assume you're on windows. Forgot the post above.

XBMC should play the VOB and IFO files properly. If you rip to a folder, you'll end up with a VIDEO_TS folder. If you browse to that in xbmc, it will play as a dvd.

Are you only wanting to play these in xbmc?

^ oh sorry, i just assumed you were running xbmc-live (which runs off of an embedded version of linux).

Snoxbox, I am basically trying to figure out how to rip these dvd's I have onto my computer and get them stored in the video library. I created a folder called "Movies", made is a shared folder, then added it as a source on XBMC. I ripped a movie into that folder, and I did see a bunch of various files within that folder. However, I am unable to get the video stored into my media library.

I find that using DVD Decrypter to get the files from the DVD to your PC works best. And to convert the files to a .avi (DIVX or XVID encoded) AutoGK works best. Google them and you'll find plenty of tutorials, even video tutorials on youtube as well.

Another thing that works pretty well if you want to keep the movies and tv shows at original quality is to use MakeMKV it'll wrap them in a .mkv wrapper with chapter support and the program likes those fine.

Trotts Wrote:I find that using DVD Decrypter to get the files from the DVD to your PC works best. And to convert the files to a .avi (DIVX or XVID encoded) AutoGK works best. Google them and you'll find plenty of tutorials, even video tutorials on youtube as well.

I agree, although I like to use DVDFab! My basic steps for ripping DVDs are:
1) Rip using DVDFab to get the .ifo and .vob files.
2) Start AutoGK and select the .VOB file of the movie I want to encode to .avi.
3) Make sure the movie is named correctly for XBMC's scrapper, and move to movies directory for XBMC
4) Update my movie library in XBMC to pull in Fanart and Meta information.

Here are some links to DVDFab, DVD Decrypter and AutoGK

http://www.dvdfab.com/
http://www.mrbass.org/dvdrip/
http://www.autogk.me.uk/

^ i know you are using windows instead of linux but i just wanted to brag that mencoder can rip/ encode dvd titles on the fly in one command without the need to store 9 gigs worth of vob's. its not included by default but its very easy to install on the xbmc live-usb.