There are a couple of tools you will need to download off the internet before any of this converting business can go down. The Three tools that I recommend for most projects is DVD Shrink and Handbrake.

Overview Programs Needed.

DVD Decrypter – This program allows you to remove most copy protections on DVD’s. This is one of the bigest hurdles to over come. Copy protection is put on movies to prevent copying them.

HandBrake – This program allows you to convert DVD files to divX / Xvid by using a graphical user interface. What this means to you is that you don’t have to know how to write scripts to convert a movie. Xvid is what an MP3 is to a CD. It’s file that looks and sounds like the orginal but is MUCH smaller and is very portable.

Avidemux – You might or might not need this program. This program’s sole purpose is to cut a part of the of the avi file created by handbrake and create a video clip.

How to rip a DVD to your computer’s hard drive.

Put in the DVD into your computer. If it starts to play or anything pops up asking to play close the window. Give your PC a few minutes to read the DVD.

Open DVD Decrypter and make sure that the “Source” is pointed to the write DVD drive. I say this because some machines come with more then one optical tray. If you only have one tray and you are sure it can read DVD’s you should see something similar.

The next thing I recommend that you do is to set the “Destination” of the DVD rip to somewhere in your profile. This is especially useful if you are running Windows Vista or Windows 7 with the UAC. So let’s do that right now.

You will noticed I changed the location from “C:\Madagascar2” to “C:\Users\Jared\Downloads\Madagascar2”.

Believe it or not that is it. Just hit the “Rip” button as seen below.

You will notice the bottom window is the log window. If your DVD is scratched or there is something else wrong with it, it should show up here in the log.

Depending on the speed of the DVD drive, your computer and your hard drive the ripping process may take anywhere from 10 Minutes up to an hour. On my laptop Madagascar 2 took just under 10 minutes.

When it completes you will see a message something similar to this:

Close DVD Decrypter.

Remove DVD from your computer.

Now that you have the DVD files on your computer you are going to need to open Handbrake.

1. Click on the “Source” button. Then select “DVD/ VIDEO_TS Folde

2. Point the program to the location of your ripped movie on your hard drive.

3. You’ll now see that in to “Source Section” that if you did everything ok Handbrake knows how long the movie is and how many chapters.

4. Go down to the “Destination section”. Tell Handbrake where you want to save the DivX movie. Click on “Browse” and give the file a name. Make sure that you select type “.avi”.

5. Go to the “Output settings”. Make sure that you have “Normal” selected. You also want to make sure that you change the format to “AVI File”.

6. We will now go over each of the first 3 of the 6 tabs at the bottom of the progrm “Picture Settins”, “Video”, “Audio & Subtitles”.

7. Picture settings – You should just use the the default settings. See screenshot to make sure that your setting line up properly.

8. Video – Video Codec should be “MPEG4 Xvid”, Frame rate 29.97, Target size should be something like 900MB. Obviously the bigger the file the better the quality.

9. Audio & Subtitles – Source (Automatic ), Audio Codec ( MP3 ), Mixdown ( 44.1 ) Bitrate ( 160 ), DRC ( 1.8 ), Subtitles ( None ).

10. Go back up to the top of the program and hit the “Green” start button.

11. A black command prompt window will open up. It will tell you how the conversion is progressing.

Once this black box closes your movie is ready to watch. But wait!

But wait!

What happens if you need a part of the movie for say a powerpoint presentation? You will need to use a program called: Avidemux.

Open Avidemux.

Go to “File” then “Open”

Pick the xvid .avi file that you just created in the last step.

Unfortunately you have to know the movie pretty well in order to do this next step. You will manually have to find the spot in the film that you want to extract. You can do this by moving the movie position bar right or left if you go to far.

You can also find the begining by entering the time of the start of the clip (it’s at the bottom of the window):

Once you find the beginning of the clip you then have to tell avidemux this is point “A”. You will notice that a blue rectangle will start from point “A” and go to the very end of the movie.

You now have to tell avidemux where the end of the clip is. You probably guessed that you have to find the end of the clip with the movie slider and then press “B”. Depending on how big the clip is you might find it hard using the slider. You might be better off using the “arrow” keys on your keyboard.

Once you are sure you have the correct starting (point A) and ending point (point B) you will have to add  the movie to the “job list”. You do this by going to: “File” – “save” – “Save Video”

A window will pop up asking where you want to save the clip to and name the Job.

Hit save button. A window will pop up and ask you this question. Hit “Yes”.

Hit “OK” for default setting.

Depending how big the clip you might not even see this next window:

Once copy finishes you will see:

Click ok. You’re Movie clip should be in the location you told avidemux to save to.

The reason why I needed to do this is when I was originally ripping a movie I deleted some of the .inf files and I no longer had access to the DVD. I normally use handbrake to convert the video files to DivX. If Handbrake can’t use the .inf files then you can’t merge the .vob files when creating a single DivX file.

So to work around this I needed something that could easily combine or merge the .vob files. One thing to note is your machine must use a file format that can read VERY large files. Most Windows PCs are now using NTFS as the file system. Things like external drives do not use this format yet. FAT32 can not support these large files. If you are having issues merging the files this could be the issue.

This whole post relies on a piece of software called: VOBMerge.

Once you have downloaded VOBMerge you should extract the files from the zip folder and run VOBMerge.

Click “Add File”.

A Window will open. Select the first .vob file that you would liked merged.

Do the last step for the remainder of the .vob files. I was in luck for this example. The movie I am working on was split up into two .vobs.

Click the “Merge” / DUMP button.

It will ask you where you want to save the new file that will merge the .vob files you selected in the previous steps.

Voila. That is all it takes.