Ripping To HDD For Media Extender/Set Top Box Playback

[Satchmo]

Hello. First post on the forums. This a great site and I have spent a lot of time here looking over the guides and forum postings. I have learned how to rip my standard def dvds to HDD in ISO, IFO, and FILE mode. I am at a crossroads on what to do next. First off I will lay out what I am trying to accomplish. A uncompressed, digital backup to HDD of my standard def dvd collection. I am not interested in burning discs. Only protecting the ones I already own from further abuse by the kids.LOL I would also gain the advantage of having a digital movie library that would be stored on a NAS or media server pc. Served to a set top box dedicated to A/V playing. Probably using XBMC live as an installed OS. No gaming or word processing here. And I could finally store the discs somewhere other than cheesy looking shelve in the living room.

So here is where I am. I have practiced ripping a dvd to ISO, IFO, and FILE modes. Region and protection free, ready to go. Each seemed to go just fine but of course have their own characteristics. Especially as it pertains to playback. My goal is to have each movie in an easy to play format, ready to go without a lot of fuss. I will list each one separately relate my experience with it and ask a question or two about it. BTW, I will add the "constants" here; Dell, Windows XP SP3 2005 MCE, 1Gb ram, 2.8Ghz Intel(not Celeron), about five year old, SMplayer for playback.

ISO: This was easy. Pointed the decrypter at it, "read" it, ripped it, and saved it. Done. Mounted it in Daemon Tools and it played just fine. Is this a good backup file type? From what I gather, ISOs are pretty much done as is. You don't really edit them. Is this correct? I ask because if I do choose to edit the rip, it would only be to drop stuf like the incessant amount(time) of the trailers all these discs seem to come with. Menus, subtitles, and such would be fine.

IFO: Interesting. It provided one big .VOB file which I gather is normal, and played it just fine. This seems appealing since it worked so easily. It loaded right up in SMplayer and played beautifully without a single hiccup. If needed, can this file be edited?

FILE: Whoah. This mode throws a lot of files at you! I also notice that no matter what I tried, I could not select all the .VOB files and get SMplayer to play them as one movie. It always stops at the end of the first .VOB. Is this normal behaviour? I suspect this mode moreso than the other two requires more than just ripping it to a folder to make it easily usable, yes?

Alright, lets assume that none of these rips are usable as is for what I want to do. What next? I am unsure about what to do with the .VOB files. Do they need to be joined together to function properly? Is there some adavantage/disadvantage to using them "as is"? My concern over editing any of the rips is the .IFO files. If I am reading the guides correctly, the IFOs tell the player where and how things are arranged in/on the disc/file and if you remove files the playback may be corrupted. Is this accurate? As I mentioned above, I am not really interested in transcoding or encoding. What litle encoding I have done on my pc has taken hours to render a fan made Star Wars flv movie of about 45 minutes to mpeg2. I can't imagine how long it wold take to transcode a full dvd to H.264 or even xvid. Besides, storage is so cheap, I don't have a compelling reason to do this. I have seen 1Tb HDDs for less than one hundred dollars retail at Best Buy. So there it is. What am I doing wrong? What if anything am I doing right? And please feel free to offer up suggestions. Thanks and sory for the long newbie post.

[guns1inger]

You could use Vobblanker to remove the bits you don't want, then turn them back to an ISO file, if that is your preferred storage method.

If you don't need menus etc, you could use the mkv container to hold the video and whatever audio and subtitle tracks you need to keep. Just rip accordingly.

[Satchmo]

Thanks for the reply guns1linger. I have seen references to the vobblanker app before and it sounds great for editing. Yet this is still a little confusing to me. Do you mean that you use vobblanker on the IFO and VOB files and then use some tool to create an ISO or do you mean you use vobblanker to edit an ISO directly? Now to the Matroska thing. I have heard great things about the mkv container format. Mostly that it is very versatile in its ability to handle just about any audio or video format you can chuck into it. But I am still just a bit confused about using it. When you say "rip accordingly" do you mean using FILE mode and then literally dropping the .VOBs file by file into the mkv container? If so, what tool do you use for this? See what I mean about being a newbie? Thanks again for the reply.

PS; Another thing I am unsure of is removing PUO restrictions. There are boxes to tick regarding PUO for both .VOB and .IFO files. Should I use either or both?

[guns1inger]

I mean do a movie only rip that contains just the audio and subtitle tracks you want. This would save you having to strip the disc back afterwards, as you already have just the parts you want. No need for VOBBlanker at all in this case.

Get rid of all the POUs. Nobody needs them.

[Satchmo]

Thank you guns1inger. I am sure I will have more questions later on.

[disturbed1]

Try Makemkv. Take a look at the program, and read about it first It does not encode the input to h264. Makemkv only wraps the original input into an mkv container. MKV is a container not a codec. You end up with a single MKV file that contains the original mpeg2 (not re-compressed/re-encoded) with the original audio (not re-compressed/re-encoded) wrapped into a single mvk file, playable by both XBMC and SMplayer. You can choose which titles to back up, chapters, subtitles .....

Give it a shot to see how it works out.

[Satchmo]

Thanks for the makemkv idea. I downloaded it. I like how it will grab the files from the disc and handle them all at once. Madde a nice, playable file that had chapter options, and even sub title options. A few questions. By defuault it passes over any "chapter" that is less than 120 seconds. Is this sort of a de facto lenght of time that covers trailers, etc.? Another thing I am unsure of is how the movie should start. If I double click on the video folder, the movie starts automatically. Normally when you start a movie you get a small start menu screen with stuff like "play movie", "scene selection" and so on. This does not appear in my mkv video file of the movie. Is this normal? One other thing I had trouble with was adding files from a folder. When I instered a disc in the drive, it worked perfectly. When I clicked the "add files" option, I could navigate to my video_ts folders but the vobs would not apppear in the explorer window for selection. What am I doing wrong? Ohter than those small issues, this works great. Fantastic program.

[disturbed1]

A few questions.
By defuault it passes over any "chapter" that is less than 120 seconds. Is this sort of a de facto lenght of time that covers trailers, etc.?

That's 2 minutes, usually not much content in 2 minutes. You can change this in the preferences.

Normally when you start a movie you get a small start menu screen with stuff like "play movie", "scene selection" and so on. This does not appear in my mkv video file of the movie. Is this normal?

That's the menu. If you want to watch a movie, is there really a reason to look all the cruft, skip past this and that, just to finally hit play? Of course if you want a COMPLETE - with menu and all the other crap - back up, you'll need to either rip to an ISO, or folder mode. This will preserve all that other junk.

One other thing I had trouble with was adding files from a folder. When I instered a disc in the drive, it worked perfectly. When I clicked the "add files" option, I could navigate to my video_ts folders but the vobs would not apppear in the explorer window for selection. What am I doing wrong? Ohter than those small issues, this works great. Fantastic program.

You open the *.IFO file.

[Satchmo]

Thank you disturbed1. I am pretty new to all this and just don't savvy all of it intuitively yet. Agree about trailers and all that. Crapola of the first order. I am just figuring out how I want to archive all this stuff. Trying to do it once, and done. Thanks again.