Recommend software to rip DVD video to an AVI or MPEG?

[Ral-Clan]

Hi, I transferred some of my old home videos (analogue) to DVD with a deck-type DVD recorder.

Now I want to be able to put the DVD in my laptop, extract the video, and convert it to MPEG or AVI (which is what my video editing software requires).

Is there any freeware (Windows) to do this?  I have searched quite a bit, but most of it seems geared to ripping the whole disc for conversion to Xvid or Divx CD-Rs, not for camcorder editing.

I'd also like to find something that extracts the DVD video without splitting up the video along chapter points.  These are music videos (my old bands) and I don't want to get any audio dropouts from having to patch together split video segments.

[Vincent]

Divx is a form of avi.  If you get the free Divx player (which includes the codecs) you should be able to edit it like you would with a normal avi/mpg file.

--edit--
Although you'd still need to rip it to Divx first of course.

[Ral-Clan]

So what exactly is .wmv (Windows Media Video)?  Is it just a new name for .avi, or is it an .avi using Windows proprietary video encoding scheme?  I've noticed that if you rename an .avi to an .wmv it still plays in most media players.

[CannonFodder]

AVI isn't really a video format per se, like IFF isn't a format.

[motorollin]

Have you looked at Handbrake? From the web site:

HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 ripper/converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.

I use it on MacOS X and it works very well.

--
moto

[NoFastMem]

Handbrake is fantastic, but it sounds like (s)he's using Windows Movie Maker or something, that probably won't import MPEG-4, or even MPEG-2 (which would be ideal).

You really want to be dealing with uncompressed .DV files for editing, any other weird intermediary file like AVI containers or MPEG4s that are really intended for final content delivery are going to wreak havoc with the AV sync (which might even be off in the DVD source to start with) and introduce another level of compression artefacts, that's three once you burn the finished project back to DVD. Ick, ick, ick.

I think FFmpeg will convert MPEG-2 (DVD) video to .DV. If your editing software won't handle .DVs, it's crap, use something else... For the sake of your end results.

[Ral-Clan]

Thanks, Handbrake looks promising and someone has also recommended SUPER to me.  

I have some old fairly amateurish video editing software: Ulead Video Studio and VideoMaker III (Windows 98, Windows XP versions).

[A4000_Mad]

Transferring video footage, converting files and creating your own DVDs is one of the most interesting and rewarding things you can do with a computer if you ask me (not that anyone has though :lol:)

Having managed to figure out how to transfer old LPs and 45s to CD, video is what I am enjoying messing about with at the moment.

I'm not sure what you would use to rip a whole DVD to an AVI or MPEG file. But if you open up your DVDs in your PC you will see a folder called 'VIDEO_TS' containing VOB files. A program called 'WinAVI Video Converter' can convert these VOB files to AVI, WMV or MPEG for you.





The program 'PowerDVD' will play any VOB files that you just want to keep in your hard drive and play whenever you like.

I'm currently use 'Pinnacle Studio 8' to record music videos directly from Sky TV music channels. A three and half minute AVI video is about 700MB though, so I convert them to MPEG-2 videos of about 150MB. With 'Pinnacle Studio 8' you can also join AVI and MPEG video files together, write DVDs and record directly from your camcorder through a IEEE1394 firewire port. I also extract the sound from the videos and convert it to MP3s to play in my computers, mobile phones and write to audio CDs.

Yeah I've also found SUPER to be great, but so far have only used it for converting my music videos to MPEG-4 to play them in my mobile phone, so I'll have to see what else it can do. That Handbrake looks like a good program as well  :-)


Ooops! Looks like a bit of a ramble but I really dig this stuff :-D

A4000 Mad