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Laurence · Jan 17, 2003, 10:35 AM

In the past I've read a few messages warning about ripping DVDs direct from the disk to MPEG4 or DivX. I remember someone saying that it is bad for the drive. This doesn't really make sense to me, as the drive spins just as fast playing DVDs as when it is converting them. The only difference is that it takes about 7-8 hours to rip a DVD from the drive and only 2 hours to play it.

I know I can rip the DVD to the HD in .vob format in about 15 minutes and then do the conversion later, but it would save quite a bit of space to do the encoding on the fly.

Opinions?

Eug · Jan 17, 2003, 10:45 AM

Ripping is not bad for the drive. It's just reading what's there after all.

Ripping on the fly? Supposedly a good all-in-one shareware (freeware?) solution will be out in a week or so. Maybe.

mmontano · Jan 18, 2003, 01:57 PM

There's a port of the LINUX mplayer/mencoder utility that rips DVDs quite nicely.

I can't stand draining a PBG4 battery with a real DVD, so I rip the movie I want to watch to a 500 or so MB file and then watch it in Quicktime.

mencoder -dvd 1 -dvd-device /dev/rdisk1 -oac copy -ovc lavc -o Movie.avi

The above line will take a 90 minute movie from Title 1 of your DVD and create an mpeg-4 (DIVX5) movie out of it. There are plenty of command line options that can optimize it even further...

Download Divx 5 and use the "validator" program to clean the file up so QuickTime Player can actually play it.

You of course, could in theory, share that resulting .avi file. But that is not what I'm doing it for.

Originally posted by Eug:
Ripping is not bad for the drive. It's just reading what's there after all.

Ripping on the fly? Supposedly a good all-in-one shareware (freeware?) solution will be out in a week or so. Maybe.

Eug · Jan 18, 2003, 02:10 PM

mmontano, if all you're doing is watching the movie off your hard drive, why are you bothering to reencode it? It seems like a big waste of time to me.

What I do for plane trips is rip the disc directly to the hard drive, with no reencode. Takes about 15 minutes, you get an exact copy of the DVD complete with all the extras and chapters, etc. The only issue is space, with each movie at about 7 GBs or so.