How do I make a high quality DivX/Xvid DVD rip?

[Weill]

I have bought the original DVD of the new Rambo movie (R2 UK version), and want to make a DVD rip so I don't have to put in the DVD to watch it as my GPU uses all my computer's power connectors and I therefore can't run my DVD drive at the same time (at least not permanently).
I have extracted all (including the VOB) files from the DVD to my computer, and now want to save space by compressing them to an avi file.

I tried using "Xilisoft DVD Ripper" and "ImTOO DVD Ripper", but whatever I do the rip turns out as a 4:3 aspect rip with black bars on all sides (vertical and horizontal bars) instead of a 16:9 rip (as I set it to) with horizontal bars (as the movie originally has a 2.35:1 aspect ratio).

What can I do to get a proper 2.35:1 rip or at least a 16:9? Do I have to use different software (as the programs mentioned above just don't get it, no matter what setting I use), and if yes which software would you recommend? I want a high quality rip with the correct aspect ratio, regardless of the size, including mp3 sound at 192kbps CBR or higher (mp3) or AC3/5.1, maybe with dual sound for commentary. In addition, the movie uses subtitles in a few scenes (specifically the ones which are not spoken in English), so how do I get the ripping program to recognize when to use the subtitles and when not to? I want to create srt files (or similar) with subtitles that only appear in non-english spoken scenes and an additional subtitle file with the director's commentary.

As I said, I own a legal copy of the DVD, and I'm legally entitled to make a backup copy in my country of residence, so I'm not doing anything illegal.

Thanks for the advice!

 

[AlexanderWinifred]

Try DivX 7 Pro Get it at http://www.divx.com/en/win . Check this : http://www.digital-digest.com/dvd/articles/dvdtodivx.html . You might want the cracked version of DivX just to try it out, I wont give a direct link, but you can search it at egydown.com . Also, avi. sucks. Use .mkv instead. The Matroska container is sleek and preserves original quality and sound. It's lighter too. You don't need a bloated decoder for it. Just use Lazy Man's MKV .

 

[CEN]

I really appreciate the thought and effort you put into writing a detailed and specific question. I can't tell you how many times someone writes a question that simply reads something like "How do I burn a DVD to my computer?", which as you can imagine, is difficult to address. When I answer those questions, I tend to feel ambivalent about even putting much thought into it, since I can usually tell that the asker won't understand what I'm saying anyway.

On the contrary, you make it easy to come up with a solution.

I'll tell you how I rip DVDs in Windows:

I first rip the VOBs from the physical DVD using DVD Decrypter: http://www.videohelp.com/tools/DVD_Decrypter

Now get Gordian Knot: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gordianknot/

Open your project files in Gordian Knot and use SubRip, which is included with Gordian Knot, to rip the subtitles from the disc. Since you said that you only want the subtitles to show at certain times, you can choose which subtitle streams you want to extract and which ones you don't, if there is more than one.

If there's only one subtitle track, then you'll have to actually edit it yourself so that you delete all of the subtitles for the time ranges in which you do not want them to show, leaving only the subtitles for the non-English scenes intact. Subtitle Workshop can be used for this: http://www.urusoft.net/products.php?cat=sw

You can save the subtitles in SRT format from Subtitle Workshop if you want. That's it for subtitles.

Open DGIndex from within Gordian Knot and let it extract the audio streams.

For video, get ffmpeg for Windows here: http://www.videohelp.com/tools/ffmpeg

Open the commandline by going to Start->Run and typing in "cmd.exe". Don't worry; you don't need to know any DOS for this.

cd into the directory where you saved ffmpeg. For example:

"cd C:\Programs\ffmpeg"

Type:

"ffmpeg -i <inputfilename> -vcodec mpeg4 -b <bitrate> -aspect 16:9 <outputfilename>"

"mpeg4" here means "XviD". It will play in any XviD-compatible software media player or hardware standalone player. Here's a chart to help you choose a bitrate: http://forum.doom9.org/archive/index.php/t-95410.html

It could take a very long time to encode the video. Once it's done, open ffmpeg again and do the audio, which should be easier:

"ffmpeg -i <inputfilename> -acodec libmp3lame -b 192k <outputfilename>"

If you have two audio tracks, such as a spoken dialogue track and an audio commentary track, just repeat that command for the second file, replacing <inputfilename> with the file itself, which you extracted with DGIndex.

Once that's done, you should have a finished XviD video file and one or more MP3 audio files, as well as your subtitle track(s). Here's the fun part: muxing.

You can actually do the muxing in ffmpeg. There's an easy GUI for this included in MeGUI, which you can get here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/megui/

Open MeGui. It will probably ask you to update it, requiring you to close and then reopen the program. Once it's updated itself, go to Tools->Muxer and choose the Matroska Muxer. This will cause a new window to open up. In the new window, you will need to choose the video file, audio tracks and subtitle tracks. Choose your video file and then choose the primary audio track (the one you want to play by default). You can choose from a drop-down menu the language and then you can enter in your own descriptor if you want. Right click on the audio tab to be able to add a second audio track. This can be the commentary track. You can choose the language again and enter something like "Director's Commentary" in the descriptor field. Then you can choose your subtitle file that you made earlier. Again, you can choose the language that gets displayed in media players from a drop-down menu. You can also right-click to add a second subtitle track if you need to.

Finally, click "Enqueue" and then in the main MeGui window choose to start the job. Hopefully it will work. MeGui crashes for me all the time in Vista x64, sometimes making it necessary for me to try several times before whatever I'm working on actually succeeds.

EDIT: And I think Colanth is probably correct about the legal issues. Gah,,,,Fair Use is complicated stuff!

 

[Juidy]

I recommend you Aiseesoft DVD Ripper.

It could easily rip DVD to MP4, H.264, AVI, MP3, WMV, WMA, FLV, MKV, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, 3GP, 3GPP, VOB, DivX, Mov, RM, RMVB, M4A, AAC, WAV, etc. with super fast DVD ripping speed and excellent image and sound quality.

It also can edit the DVD movies, such as trim a video clip, crop the movie, merge several titles or chapters into one file and so on.

Hope can help you!
http://www.converter123.com/DVD-Tools/Aiseesoft-DVD-Ripper.html


This DVD Ripper is the most powerful one that I have used before.