Ripping particular features from a DVD

[Dunnyman]

I've done my search, and all I can find is ripping an entire DVD to avi or mpeg or whatever. What I'm trying to do is take a DVD of TV eps, and pull several of them to eventually combine with others that I've had for some time to build a complete set of these eps. Basically, the DVD I have has 3 out of the 6 on the disc that I want, I don't need the others. I've played with OSex a little, and never could get it to work. A tutorial, pointers, or just some direction as to what tools I need for this.

[tgpo]

I'd suggest using YadeX to rip the individual features to m2v and ac3 files and using DVDSP or Sizzle to assemble again.

[galactica]

OSeX is really easy, you just put check marks next to what you want, and then choose your output option and hit start.

if you want a chapter you can just rip that chapter.
I believe it also does titles if its a multi title disk

or as tgpo pointed out you can also use YadeX

[Dunnyman]

Couldn't get OSex to work at all, maybe the recent updates to OSX have crippled it, I don't know, but Yadex did the trick, now, if I've got a whole bunch of 1/2 hour TV eps, some ripped from DVD, some from other sources, but all of the (roughly) apsects, bitrates, etc are the same, what would you recommend as the maximum amount of episodes per DVD? Once I build the final disc in Sizzle, I can shrink it in DVD2One if need be, but with a total of 16 eps, how many discs should I break it up over? It's animation, so the quality won't be as critical, but I don't want to compress it to death...

[DeleriumMDK]

I fit a 52 episode anime series across 3 DVD-R's using standard VCD bitrate and with the audio resampled from 44 to 48 as required by the DVD specifications. VCD quality is good enough for me when its animated.

[deadsierra]

DeleriumMDK's advice is excellent, but I would do it this way:

Check the the file size on one of your episodes. If (as you say) it is similar in file size to the others, you can assume that its the same. Now figure out how many you need to fill a DVD. numberepsneeded=4500/episodesizeMB (gotta practice my math, you know). Then, you know approximately how many episodes you need to fill a DVD. You'll probably need to round down, and you might adjust the size of the DVD by a few megs (i use crappy ones that seem to like 4444 in DVD2OneX YMMV). Then you have a good idea of how many you can fit per disc, without shrinking. If you think the number is too small, you can crank it up, and DVD2OneX it, or you could re-encode the eps to VCD or CVD or whatever. But, whatever you decide to do, calculating the number of eps is a good way to get a base number to work with.

[Dunnyman]

Ok, so far, so good, thanks all for the advice, but a question: On the tracks ripped from the DVD, I have roughly 850 megs of video per episode, and only 31-35 megs of AC3 audio? Is this about right for a half hour TV episode? Or did I not rip it correctly using Yade?When I ripped, I got several AC3 tracks per ep, but the labels on them corresponded to the languages listed on the DVD, so I deleted the spanish and french audio tracks, but is that kind of compression normal? The tracks I've ripped from MPEG1 VCD sources using ffmpegX come up with about 569 megs of video and 75 megs of audio...I'm TOTALLY new to ripping DVD's to anything other than MTR or DVDBackup for copying.

[maetel99]

I think you can also do what you want using Cinematize if you extract all streams together as MPEG-2 Program Stream files. That way you will have a chunk of the VOB with exactly the episode you want, and you can preserve the AC-3 sound, subtitles, etc. You can then do the same thing with your other episodes, then bring them all into Sizzle or DVD Studio Pro, make some menus, and create your new DVD.

[deadsierra]

Ok, so far, so good, thanks all for the advice, but a question: On the tracks ripped from the DVD, I have roughly 850 megs of video per episode, and only 31-35 megs of AC3 audio?

Ripping the tracks of Farscape yields about 60-70MB per 50 minute episode, so I assume yours are fine.