Monday, February 20, 2012

That's a Rippin' DVD

How best to make a DVD backup? With the latest software, it's now just a two-step process - ripping and encoding.

First you have to rip the DVD. This is so because most DVDs come with copy protection. For this, you'll need DVD Decrypter (or SmartRipper). DVD Decrypter makes a backup of the disk image onto your hard disk. You have a choice of file mode or IFO mode, depending on what you want to back up. Next step is to convert the VOB files to AVI. For trouble-free MPEG-4 encoding, I would go for Auto Gordian Knot. I heard Freemake can do the same thing, but I haven't tried it yet.

Simply put, AutoGK is video encoding for dummies. You select the input VOB file, choose the audio track and subtitle track (if available), choose the output size, add the job, then start. For the output size, you can choose preset sizes, your custom size, or set the target quality. I went as low as 25% for a nursery rhyme DVD, and it still came out fine. Under Advanced Settings, you can also choose the resolution, the coded (XviD or DivX), and audio type. For a two-hour DVD, the single-pass encoding process took approximately an hour; 5 GBs shrunk down to 800MB.

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