Best DVD ripping tool?

[bkkfrank]

Hi,

I need to back up a DVDs of some movies and some of TV series into mkv files.

Being a newbie, I would like to get advices from the community to know what is the best available tool (free or not).
The major requirements being able to rip DVDs into mkv files with soft subtitles. I indeed want to back up subtitles in more than one language and I do not want them "hard-coded" (burned in) the image but rather selectable or not displayed at all.

Regarding subtitles, my understanding is that they are not text files in the DVD but rather images so I would prefer to rip the subtitles as images instead of text files, the later probably needing some kind of OCR technology which would probably not work for Asian languages and is error prone as well for western languages.
I have no idea of what are the subtitles formats which are not text files, the only format i know is srt and that is not what i want.

The best would be to have a single tool which is able to do the DVD ripping plus extracting the various subtitles at once. Hopefully that might exists, if not then what is the ideal tool set that i will need to use?

Thanks for the help,

Frank

[Baldrick]

MakeMKV. It will create one MKV from the DVD without any compression. I guess it supports subtitles also.

Or do you also want to shrink the video? Then try Handbrake and create one MKV with h264 video and with soft subs.

And for ripping=decrypting install anydvd or use dvdfab decrypter.

[bkkfrank]

Thanks for the help, i also want to shrink the vdo, i should have mentioned that!
I have read about handbrake but i thought it supported only burned in subs. I'll try it out.

Do you also know of a good tool to extract only the subtitles from a dvd in a non text format?

Thanks

[Baldrick]

Use VSRip to rip DVD to image sub/idx subtitles.

[minerva.thegift]

I have had good luck with the MeGUI encoder (it's a front end for the command line based mencoder.) I have made .mkv files with it that include subtitles. I'd recommend looking in the "Guides" section of this website and searching for guides using Handbrake and guides using MeGUI and do a bit of reading on both of them and see which one you think would work for you. Note that even if the encoder program you are using doesn't support "soft" subs, you can mux (add in) subtitle files to a .mkv using mkvmerge GUI (part of the mkvtoolnix package.) In other words, even if you can only get audio/video and no subtitles, it's OK because you could use another program (like VSRip, as Baldrick mentioned) to get the subtitles into a pair of files and then add them in to your .mkv using mkvmerge GUI.