I am a huge fan of the Windows XP Media Center operating system (also Vista Home Premium). It makes it so easy to save all your media content on one computer and have it shareable throughout your home via other computers or Media Center Extenders. Right out of the box you have the ability to share your music, pictures, videos, TV, and radio. You can also install additional programs to extend the functionality of your Media PC. I very much enjoy the program “My Movies” as it lets you create a database of your movie collection complete with an image of the movie cover. Not only that but if you RIP the movie to your hard drive, you can simply choose “Watch” and it will immediately begin playing. I have a media library of over 250 movies so far that are (almost) all available at the click of a button (I say almost because I haven’t yet figured out how to RIP a movie WITH the subtitles in tact, so for those foreign movies we still have to be old school and put in the disk).
I thought I would make this blog entry about the process I use to RIP movies as there are some hoops to jump through in order to do it successfully. Let me start off by saying that I do not endorse ripping movies that you do not own. This is not intended to help you steal movies but to help you put your legally purchased movies onto your hard drive. Having said that, let’s get started.
Backup
First, I like to make a backup copy of the DVD. I have used two programs to do this. I started with “ICopyDVDs2” which is pretty good but there are some disks (mostly Sony Movies) that it cannot do. It is pretty cheap software though. Later on I found “DVDFab 5”. This one has a much better success rate. They are both able to squeeze a movie down to fit a standard single layer DVD from a dual layer original. So, using one of these two programs you make your copy of the original disk. One additional feature of DVDFab 5 is that you have the option of copying just the main movie without all of the other special features, games, etc. This is helpful so that your backup copy is as high quality as possible despite having possibly been shrunken down to fit a single layer disk. Also, by doing this step first, you can remove any encryption the original movie may have had so your backup copy is easier to RIP.
RIP
Next we rip the movie from the newly created backup copy. Ripping from the backup makes the resulting movie a bit smaller in size so as not to take up too much hard drive space. To do this, I use “DVD Decrypter”. I like DVD Decrypter because it has a setting that will combine the various VOB files from the DVD into a single large VOB file. Usually they are split up into 4 to 6 one GB files. You can go either way but the single file saves a step later. And again, there are some disks that don’t rip perfectly using DVD Decrypter. DVDFab 5 can fill this void as well. If using DVDFab 5, I will first copy the movie and then when DVDFab 5 asks if I want to burn another copy, I will go to the temporary area DVDFab 5 uses to store the individual VOB files and copy them out of that directory to be used later. The whole point here is to get the VOB (or VOBs) to use for the next step.
Convert to MPG
Next step is to convert the VOB or VOBs to a single MPG file. The program I use for this is “Video ReDo Plus”. There are three reasons for using this program. One is that the ripped VOB or VOBs are sometimes off in their timing. Video ReDo re-times them so they play correctly using the “Quickstream Fix” feature. Two is that it has the ability to combine multiple video files into a single file using it’s “Joiner” feature. (if you have multiple VOBs, first run the VOBs through the quickstream fix which converts the file to MPG and re-times it simultaneously, then use Joiner to paster the different pieces together into one large file). Three is that it converts to the MPG format. The MPG format is compatible with playing through a Media Center Extender like an Xbox 360 through your network. The file that results from using this program is the finished file ready to play.
Enjoy
That is basically it. Now that you have your finished MPG file, you can organize them into individual folders and then point “My Movies” to each locally stored folder. My Movies then looks in that folder and plays the MPG file when you click to “watch” from your Media Center Extender. If you have questions about any part of the process, please comment so that I can clarify a little better.
Amazon Movies
I want to leave one note about the digital movies that you can buy from Amazon. I was excited about this new way of purchasing movies until I actually tried it. I bought “The Dark Knight” DVD from Amazon and they included a digital download of the movie for free. This was great because I wouldn’t have to go through the process to RIP the movie myself. Well, one night my wife and I decided to watch it so I downloaded the movie which is pretty simple once you install the Amazon video download software. I don’t know if all of the Amazon movies are in the WMV format but this one was. I saved it in a directory where we could play it through an Extender and we headed downstairs to watch it. The picture looked great, just like a DVD. But, the sound was not good at all. We found ourselves turning up the volume so that we could hear what the actors were saying only to be blasted away at the next action scene. So, I put in the DVD and the sound was just fine after that. Later on, I ripped the DVD into the MPG format and both the video and audio are fine. I don’t know if there was just a problem with this particular Amazon movie download or if this would be the case for all their movies but it left me not really wanting to download a movie from Amazon again. I’ll stick to actual DVDs and I’ll RIP them myself. At least it didn’t cost me anything.
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Press Release
The craze these days is to green up our lives. We are supposed to buy hybrid cars, put solar panels on our roof, buy more energy efficient appliances and light bulbs, in addition to buying only organic food (thanks John and Kate plus 8). I think it’s great. I am not a tree hugger or anything like that, not that I have a problem with those of you that dedicate yourselves to saving the planet. I think we really should be good to the planet that we all enjoy. I am just not fanatical about it. I do my part by recycling, but only because our city charges me for it whether I actually do it or not. And it doesn’t take any extra effort really. So yes, I’m doing my part.