Ripper that will batch rip episodes (but not DVDFab)???

[teknomedic]

Long story short... I need to rip individual episodes (and or extras, easter eggs, etc) from my DVDs. I do NOT want to convert them during this process. The end result should be "episode1.vob, episode2.vob, episode3.vob, etc, etc". This program should not only do this, but play nice and work with AnyDVD running in the background. Batch ripping of the VOBs is also a must.


So far I've been using DVDFab for this using VOB pass-through... DVDFab allows me to select several titles at once and then rip each episode to it's own personal VOB file. Due to some protected DVD complications that DVDFab can not bypass... I've tried AnyDVD and found it is working where DVDFab failed. DVDFab will not work correctly with AnyDVD running in the background... or so the error it gives says.

DVD Decrypter also does this, BUT I can only rip one title/episode at a time (instead of batch operation)

CloneDVD does not do this either BTW.


--Basically, my process used to be insert DVD, load DVDFab, select episodes, rip, then convert.
--Now I have to do... Run AnyDVD, insert DVD, Rip with AnyDVD, close AnyDVD, load DVDFab and point to AnyDVD rip, select episodes, rip again, then convert.

I'd like to get back to insert DVD, load (unknown) ripper, select episodes, rip, then convert.


So....

Is there a ripper that can rip individual titles/chapters/episodes into an individual VOB directly from the DVD (using AnyDVD to remove protections) AND do all this in batch form (allowing me to select all the episodes I want, then ripping several VOBs with "one press" of a button)?


Thanks for any tips.

[Steve(MS)]

Do you have to have them vob?
VOB2MPG will select whichever episodes you want, you can select all of them, you can make them into individual files, if you like.

No, dvdfab and anydvd don't play well, using at the same time.
So you will need to use one or the other for decrypting.

You could rip entire disc to hard drive using either and then open fab and select individual episode and
copy them to a different file on computer.

Offhand, I don't know a way to break them into different files while ripping but wouldn't be surprised if it could be done.
Perhaps you can use vob2mpg and anydvd together and rip the separate episodes in mpg form.

Edit: vob2mpg doesn't by itself decrypt....

[teknomedic]

They don't have to be in VOB... BUT... they can't be compressed or otherwise altered during ripping either as that will degrad the image and or sound quality. I know that Mpeg and VOB are basically the same thing (I think, lol), so maybe I'll get 1:1 image/sound quality by using that???

I'm just trying to save some extra steps... right now I rip with AnyDVD... but then I have to use DVDFab to split up the resulting VOBs to the correct episodes so that I can place them into my encoding program.

It would just be nice to keep AnyDVD running... load up my ripper and directly rip from DVD to my "episodic VOBs" without the extra step of ripping an ISO or DVD file structure to a folder first.

[hech54]

They don't have to be in VOB... BUT... they can't be compressed or otherwise altered during ripping either as that will degrad the image and or sound quality.

That great because a "rip" of a DVD is the act of copying the EXACT original content of a DVD or Blu Ray disc to your hard drive or other storage media. A "rip" or the act of "ripping" NEVER involves alterations to the original quality.

[Steve(MS)]

AFAIK, vob2mpg doesn't change resolution or anything like that.
But I don't know if the subtitles and all that stuff are still intact.
My guess is you will have to live with the way you are doing it now, that is, rip with anydvd and then individually select
each track after they are on your hard drive and copy to a different location on hard drive via dvdfab.

[teknomedic]

lol... glad we agree... any suggestions for a batch ripper with title/chapter/episode selection that will play nice with AnyDVD????

[teknomedic]

I'll give vob2mpg a try, but would prefer VOBs.

I'm removing subs, menus, etc anyway... but still want 1:1 video/audio quality so that my encoding software can do all the heavy work.

[Steve(MS)]

Yet...if you wanted to, you could use dvdfab and select each individual episode...while on disc but you will
have to reopen fab for each episode while it is on disc....

[Steve(MS)]

Check and see if subtitles are retained with vob2mpg before you do too many of them.

[teknomedic]

I'll run a test of vob2mpg... I'm also going to run a test with DVDFab (with AnyDVD running) and see if DVDFab's VOB pass-through and batched title ripper will still pull directly from the disc without causing issues.

It will be a little bit as I'm currently coding a full season.



...to make matters worse... I'm also looking for a program that will do Bluray discs like this as well, lol. You'd think by 2013 there would be tons of little programs that would do this... or at least updated "old" programs that would have added these features.

DVD Decrypter is almost exactly what I need as an example... it just doesn't have batch processing or Bluray support.

[Steve(MS)]

I looked at an output from vob2mpg, it does appear that it has text in it...I saw 3 but don't know what they are.
This particular movie evidently has 2 audio tracks, English and likely Spanish.
So it may retain subtitles but make sure to check for yourself.
Going from vob to mpg doesn't do any encoding so the quality should be the same.
I use it to put dvd movies on ext. hard drive to play to tv since the built in media player I am using doesn't play vobs.

Blu-rays are another matter, not many tools to choose from.

[hello_hello]

DVD Shrink. With AnyDVD running in the background you can open a disc, reauthor it by dragging the individual titles from the right pane to the left (in re-author mode) and then use the backup function. If you have more than one drive, you can open a second disc, drag it's titles across and rip them as a single DVD compilation.

Before ripping with DVD Shrink you need to go into it's options and uncheck "split vob files into 1GB parts". That way DVD Shrink will output one large vob file per episode/title. You also need to change the default target size option so DVD shrink won't try to re-encode the video. It's set to DVD5 by default. Change it to something like 50GB so you never need to think about it again.

DVD Shrink will also let you select specific audio and subtitles to be ripped. Once a title has been dragged to the left pane you can also edit it (I often use it to remove the studio junk at the beginning of movies). The only thing it can't do is tell you which title corresponds to which episode. They're not always in a logical order (title 2 might be episode 1 etc) so it pays to check they're in the correct order after ripping.

[teknomedic]

Did some testing... not a fan of vob2mpg as it doesn't work perfectly for what I'm trying to attempt.

The DVD Shrink setup suggested above works as intended though.

Also learned that CloneDVD Mobile has a VOB pass-through setting and works as well.

Finally, I'm also able to use DVDFab's VOB pass-through setting with AnyDVD running. Haven't noticed any errors or problems there either.


So in conclusion... I'd say use one of these three setups with AnyDVD running in the background.... DVD Shrink gets the nod because it's free.

DVD Shrink (using re-author and adjusting some settings to disable "shrinking")
CloneDVD Mobile using the VOB passthrough option
DVDFab using the VOB passthrough option


thanks for all the suggestions and help... now to more ripping.

[hello_hello]

By the way, there's possibly no need to rip episodes as a single large vob file if you're converting the ripped files to another format. Any encoder GUI which uses DGDecode to index mpeg2 video and extract the audio can work with multiple vob files (most of the AVIsynth based encoder GUIs such as MeGUI would use DGDecode). You'd still want to re-author the DVD so each episode has it's own set of vob files but there's no reason to split them. If there's more than one vob file per episode you only need to open the first one and DGDecode will automatically include the rest. The end result is exactly the same either way.

Whether other encoder GUIs which don't use DGDecode generally work the same way I'm not sure. Some may let you open the ifo file associated with each set of vob files and encode each set as a single file that way. Some are even more clever and let you open the main ifo file then choose which title to encode. It'll depend on the program. If it's the latter re-authoring a disc while ripping instead of ripping the whole disc might stop that from working correctly. I've only ever used two DGDecode based programs for converting DVDs myself (AutoGK and MeGUI) so I don't really know what the other popular encoder GUIs can do when converting DVDs.

[teknomedic]

Another good tip, thank you.

I'm not sure I'm following you correctly though.... I'm not trying to have one large VOB file, but rip them so each title/episode has it's own vob.

Also, I've found that I get better results if I rip first, then encode vs ripping/encoding directly from disc.

again, sorry if I didn't fully get your reply. I know what you're saying... just not how it relates to what I want to do.

[hello_hello]

Sorry, I may have confused the issue. And I just realised I referred to vts files a couple of times when I should have said ifo files, so what I posted probably didn't make complete sense anyway. I've corrected my previous post.
I wasn't referring to having one large vob file for the entire disc. This might explain what I meant a little better:

Without splitting the vobs when re-authoring with DVD Shrink, the ripped files for two episodes might look like this:

VTS_01_0.IFO
VTS_01_0.VOB
VTS_02_0.IFO
VTS_02_0.VOB

If you split the vobs when re-authoring, the ripped files for two episodes might look like this:

VTS_01_0.IFO
VTS_01_1.VOB
VTS_01_2.VOB
VTS_01_3.VOB
VTS_02_0.IFO
VTS_02_1.VOB
VTS_02_2.VOB
VTS_02_3.VOB

The disc is still re-authored the same way, but in the second example the vob files for each episode are split into 1GB parts. That's they way it's normally done as it's the way they're written to DVD. Being able to not split them using DVD Shrink is probably an exception when it comes to ripping programs.
The same might apply to ripping just a movie. You might end up with a single vob file or a set of them.

So I guess I was just trying to explain that either method is usually fine. When it's re-authored correctly you'll either have a single vob file per episode or a set of vob files per episode. Any decent DVD conversion program should handle both correctly. In the second case you'd either open the IFO file corresponding to each episode and the program will know which vob files to encode, or you'd open the first vob file in each episode "set" and the encoder will include the rest. So opening VTS_02_1.VOB will automatically encode VTS_02_1.VOB, VTS_02_2.VOB and VTS_02_3.VOB as if it was a single unsplit vob file.

There's also a "master" IFO file included in each set of DVD files. It's the one without a number (VIDEO_TS.IFO) Some conversion programs will even open it and pop up with a menu asking which title you're wanting to encode. If that's the case you can probably just rip the whole DVD without re-authoring and use the master IFO file to encode individual episodes, but many programs require you to re-author the DVD as above first.

Sorry if I confused you, but I thought if you weren't aware of it already, the above might be handy to know for future reference.

[teknomedic]

lol, no worries.

I hadn't realized though perhaps suspected. This is worth knowing in case I (or anyone else) run into any issues where the splitting isn't being done correctly or some other errors are present in the files. This info would allow me another way of thinking to try and rip as needed.

Definitely appreciate it.