Best way to rip DVD's?

GJones Wrote:.....OR

You could trust that the Handbrake developers actually know what they are doing and use their defaults (which amazingly work rather well).

HandbrakeCLI --preset "High Profile" -i /dev/dvd -o MovieName.mkv -f mkv

Of course, if you don't care about file size, MakeMKV is the better choice (makemkvcon --minlength 1200 mkv disc:0 all .). But since the OP does care about file size, the Handbrake suggestion above is a good compromise between size and quality.


PS Setting Handbrake's quality to 100% makes no sense. The quality is measured by the uncompressed result of rendering each frame. The normal compression ratio for Handbrake is 20% (-q 0.20) and is extremely close to the original DVD quality. Upping the ratio a bit (-q 0.17) produces only marginally better images and about 15-20% increase in file size.

Listen to this man. About the only good post I read in this thread.

To sum it up...if you want it left as is use makemkv. If you want to encode it use either the standard or high profile in handbrake. Don't change the CF factor. It will look great and the size will be greatly reduced.

good to know that

Am I right in thinking you tend to RIP DVDs on a separate machine to the one you run XBMC on then?

I used to love that my Xbox had a DVD drive and software on there to rip the DVD to the hdd with no fuss, but I've just procured an Acer Aspire Revo which unfortunately doesnt' have an optical drive and i'm loathe to add one if I can help it.

xvidenc or h264enc are really good.

cable_guy Wrote:Am I right in thinking you tend to RIP DVDs on a separate machine to the one you run XBMC on then?

I used to love that my Xbox had a DVD drive and software on there to rip the DVD to the hdd with no fuss, but I've just procured an Acer Aspire Revo which unfortunately doesnt' have an optical drive and i'm loathe to add one if I can help it.

I know this is a very late answer to a question, but here goes:

I have a Revo 3610 with an external USB DVD. I pull movies down using makemkvcon. I then put them in the right directory to be indexed by XBMC.

I have a script that looks through my TV and movie folders for files that have yet to be transcoded. It queues them up (using task spooler, ts) and HandBrakeCLI transcodes them. When it is done it puts the new file in the original folder and pulls the original file into another folder. The new file has _H264 inserted before the file extension so I can tell them apart.

This entire process runs in the background on my XBMC machine. The dual-core hyperthreaded Atom processor isn't fast, but thanks to VDPAU, I am able to watch movies on the same box without an impact.

This marries a cheap external DVD with a cheap and available machine. It allows me quick access to ripped material (original MPEG2 mkv) and transcodes movies as soon as possible. All for a Revo 3610, a $60 external DVD (a few years ago).

^ nice, fyi i use xvidenc/ mencoder on my revo running xbmc-live-usb.

with a little linux-fu you can mount the dvd drive on my fedora laptop on the network and access it on the revo (no need to buy a $60 external dvd doo-hickey).