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  1. Member crjackson's Avatar
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    Hi, I was wondering if anyone here could point me in a better direction.

    I finally did away with (mostly) DVD media in favor of putting a disk image (img) file onto a portable hard drive, and connecting that to my WDLive TV box. It works great, but now I have the task of ripping (might not be correct terminology) the movies from non-copy protected DVD's to my hard drive as movie.img format.

    Currently, I'm using DVD2ONE to pull the files directly from the DVD and making a img file. I have 2 concerns about this.

    Is DVD2ONE recompressing and damaging the quality?

    Is there a better method?

    I wish I could find some firmware updates for my optical drives to kill Riplock. It's painfully slow, and I have about 900 DVD's to go.

    Thanks in advance.
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    Is there a better solution? Yes.

    AnyDVD and DVDFab. Pay for them. Don't use the free DVDFab (there is no free AnyDVD beyond an evaluation period).

    I can't speak to what DVD2ONE does as I don't use it.

    Before you do what many Americans do, which is rip their DVDs and then get rid of them, give some thought to what you are going to do to protect your rips - spare hard drives with copies, some kind of network storage, etc. Any storage solution that will fail if 2 drives die at the same time doesn't offer you as much security as you might think as it is possible for 2 drives to die at the same time, especially if their manufacture dates are close. I'm not saying it's likely, but the odds are not 1 in 1000000 either. Maybe 1 in 100 chance of 2 drives dying at the same time. I read about a guy who had that happen to him and the only thing that saved him was that just for the heck of it he had made a backup of his files a month or two earlier on a cloud storage system and he had to pull everything he could back down from that backup when 2 drives died within hours of each other in his NAS. See he got the first failed drive replaced, but the 2nd drive died before the NAS rebuilt the storage using the new drive, so the result was a catastrophic loss of everything in the NAS. If you rip 900 DVDs and get rid of them and then have a catastrophic failure, life is going to suck for you with no plan to deal with it. And we do get posts from people who lose their only disk drives with no other copies and the data is gone forever.
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  3. Member crjackson's Avatar
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    The DVD's aren't copy protected. I just wanted to copy to the hard drive as a disk image *.img file. I'm not discarding the DVD's, and I have multiple backups of the HD. I just want to find the most efficient way of making an *.img file of the DVDs. I'm looking for a Mac solution.

    DVD2ONE works fine, but I'm not sure if it's trying to recompress them or not.
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  4. If the img. file created by DVD2ONE is the same as the original DVD it's not recompressing.
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  5. Member crjackson's Avatar
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    What happens is that you point DVD2ONE to the VIDEO_TS folder on the DVD and then select the output to an image file. So you are saying that if the DVD is already compressed to size, DVD2ONE won't recompress?
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    Originally Posted by crjackson View Post
    I'm looking for a Mac solution.
    I think DVDFab works on Macs, but you did clearly post this in the Mac forum as you should have, so my apology for not catching that.

    There's always Mac The Ripper, but as I don't use my one Mac for ripping, I have no personal experience on how good/bad it is.
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  7. Originally Posted by crjackson View Post
    What happens is that you point DVD2ONE to the VIDEO_TS folder on the DVD and then select the output to an image file. So you are saying that if the DVD is already compressed to size, DVD2ONE won't recompress?
    The intended word "size" dropped out of my orignal post. Oops. It should have said, If the img. file created by DVD2ONE is the same size as the original DVD it's not recompressing.
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  8. Originally Posted by crjackson View Post
    Is DVD2ONE recompressing and damaging the quality?
    yes
    Is there a better method?
    no if you want too reduce the weight of your video

    an mpeg2 stream is made with:
    - a full image each 1/2second (the heaviest ones!) called "I"
    - and some partial images …between full images (they does not spend a lot of disk space) called "P" and "B"

    an mpeg2 compressor compress the "I" frames to reduce the final size
    if you used iDVD or if the DVD is a commercial one, you can easily recompress the video with no so much loss (iDvd or commercials make big movies… for nothing)
    if you compress too much, you will notice artifacts (blocking / squares/ etc).
    There is no miracle: DVD2One has a good algorithm to compress these "I" frames.

    So compress a little => no visual concerns
    compress a lot => visual damages

    An other solution (to reduce disk usage) is to convert your DVD (mpeg2 codec) to a more efficient compressor format (aka h264). But it's time consuming (and you have to extract video from DVD first)

    bye
    For DVD, iPad, HD, connected TV, … iMovie & FCPX? MovieConverter-Studio 3 (01/24/2015) - Handle your camcorder's videos? even in 60p or 60i? do a slow-motion? MovieCam.
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  9. PS:
    Originally Posted by crjackson View Post
    DVD2ONE works fine, but I'm not sure if it's trying to recompress them or not.
    your soft decompress the initial disk if it is too big to fit in your "specified size" (usually, the default setting is 4.300MB)
    If your initial disk does not fit your specified threshold, so DVD2One just copy your initial disk

    bye
    For DVD, iPad, HD, connected TV, … iMovie & FCPX? MovieConverter-Studio 3 (01/24/2015) - Handle your camcorder's videos? even in 60p or 60i? do a slow-motion? MovieCam.
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  10. Member crjackson's Avatar
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    I think you misunderstood. I don't want to re-compress. They are already DVD5. I could just store them as ISO files without changing them, but IMG files work better with my WDTV Live.
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  11. Member Cornucopia's Avatar
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    Back up to square one!

    You've got a Mac. You've already got NON-Protected DVDs. All you need to do is use Toast or Apple's DiskUtitlity to make IMG files from the discs. Or use DVD2one, if what it gives you is the same size as the source disc. If it's the same size, it's NOT re-compressing. (If it were, you would know because it would take much longer than a simple file-copy delay)

    <edit>and if you already have some ISOs but need IMG files, just do a google search on "ISO to IMG mac" and you'll find a number of ways to do it easily.

    Scott
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  12. Member crjackson's Avatar
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    No, I don't already have the ISO's but they are easy to create. I don't know how to create the IMG files using disk utility (I tried it once, but couldn't figure out how to image the DVD). I'll try that again. Toast seems heavy duty for the task, but if that's what I need to do I'll go that route. It's really hard to tell if DVD2ONE is re-compressing anything because my OD's are rip locked and it goes slowly anyway.

    I can't find firmware to unlock either of my OD's. I may have to stick in an older Pioneer from my old system that isn't rip locked.
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  13. Member Cornucopia's Avatar
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    OD's? (not familiar with the term)
    Do you mean Original Discs? If so, Rip Lock probably means they are still encrypted. Which would mean that you still need a Decrypter in place prior to (or during) ripping to the ISO/IMG.

    Scott
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  14. VH Wanderer Ai Haibara's Avatar
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    By 'rip locked,' crjackson means that his optical drives (which was probably what he meant by "OD's") are limited to ripping at a rather slow speed, like the SuperDrive on my Mac. I haven't tried ripping a DVD on it in some time, but I know it took over 45 minutes.

    Also, just for reference - and I know it's a Wikipedia link, but... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riplock
    Last edited by Ai Haibara; 27th Feb 2014 at 18:18.
    If cameras add ten pounds, why would people want to eat them?
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  15. Member crjackson's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by Cornucopia View Post
    OD's? (not familiar with the term)
    Do you mean Original Discs? If so, Rip Lock probably means they are still encrypted. Which would mean that you still need a Decrypter in place prior to (or during) ripping to the ISO/IMG.

    Scott
    No, OD (Optical Drive), should have said ODD..

    They aren't encrypted, not commercial disks. They are recordable DVD5 media.
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  16. Member crjackson's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by Ai Haibara View Post
    By 'rip locked,' crjackson means that his optical drives (which was probably what he meant by "OD's") are limited to ripping at a rather slow speed, like the SuperDrive on my Mac. I haven't tried ripping a DVD on it in some time, but I know it took over 45 minutes.

    Also, just for reference - and I know it's a Wikipedia link, but... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riplock
    Exactly, when using my Linux or Windows PC, I had (still have, just retired the system) a Pioneer & a Plextor drive with updated firmware that removed Riplock & Region codes. I can't find any firmware to do the same for my Apple SuperDrive or MCE (LG I think) Blu-Ray burner.

    It takes 20~30 minutes....
    Last edited by crjackson; 27th Feb 2014 at 18:39.
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  17. VH Wanderer Ai Haibara's Avatar
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    My attempts were probably longer because I was ripping retail DVD-9 DVD-Video discs.

    I don't think I've ever seen anyone post alternate firmware or a way to disable RipLock on a SuperDrive, unfortunately.
    If cameras add ten pounds, why would people want to eat them?
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  18. Member crjackson's Avatar
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    It's not really a big deal since I have two drives, but I'm considering putting in my Pioneer drive in place of the SuperDrive since I still have about 1,000 more Disc's to go.
    Last edited by crjackson; 27th Feb 2014 at 18:54.
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