By Monte Ferguson Our feature presentation was given by our own Monte Ferguson. He remarked that he had started looking into DVD conversion as his children grew up. Great way to save wear and tear on the DVD’s. However there are some technical hurdles to overcome. Unlike audio CD’s, DVD’s are encrypted at the root level and always have been. The other issue is that a DVD is a more complex beast, think nested folders, and incorporates a lot more data than a CD.
(The very act of copying the material on the disks is technically breaking the law, Digital Millennium Copyright Act. However, it’s highly unlikely that you will be in any legal trouble as long as you only do this for yourself. And only using DVD’s that you have purchased. Which falls under Fair Use legal precedents.)
Before beginning Monte mentioned that he prefers to copy the Video_TS folder to the Mac before encoding. Yes, it does add an extra step and extra time. The upside is it saves wear and tear on the optical drive. (Otherwise the optical drive would be in constant use during the encoding process.)
Depending on your needs there are different strategies, and corresponding tools. Monte outlined three likely scenarios.
1) You just want to play the movie on your Mac, exactly as it is on the DVD including menus and bonus material. To do this you need to copy the Video_TS folder to your Mac. But due to encryption you can’t just drag and drop it. You can get around this by using The right tools. One example was a combination of Fairmount and VLC player, which decrypts the disk and mounts it as a standard disk image allowing you to drag the files to the Mac desktop. Another option is Mac the Ripper which scans the disks and rips (copies), and unencrypts the contents of the DVD. Although both work pretty well Mac the Ripper generally is faster. The process takes around 20-30 minutes on a 2.x Ghz Core2Duo iMac. When you’re done you can use Leopard’s DVD Player to play the files you copied.
2) You want to make a back up copy of your DVD’s. That way you can store the originals and the copies take all of the abuse. If Video_TS is under 4.4GB you can use the tools in the previous situation to copy the content to your Mac. You can then use any tool that can burn a DVD to make a back up. (Examples: Toast, Dragon Burn) It will play just fine in a DVD player.
There is a problem with newer DVD’s in that the files on them are too large to fit on a standard DVD blank. You can turn to programs like DVD Remaster and DVD2OneX. They reincode the video files to fit on a standard DVD.
3) You want to just convert the movie so you can watch it on your Mac, iPod, iPhone or Apple TV. In this case you only want to watch the movie, and there is no need for the menus or bonus content. Tools you can use for this purpose include Handbrake, VLC Player, Mac the Ripper, Pop Corn etc.
After having moved the files over to the Mac hard drive the next step is to transcode the feature into a single file that only has the movie. You can also resize the output file so it fits in the display area of the device you will be watching it on. Monte says he prefers to transcode the video into MP4 files, using the H.234 codec, like the iTunes store does. It produces the best looking video and at the smallest sizes. The only downside is it’s processor intensive. Plan on an encoding to take about 2x the length of the video.
Monte ended the meeting with some general suggestions. He said to make sure you pay attention to your initial rip. You either want it to be set to Region 0 or Region 1. That way it will play in DVD players sold in North America. He also suggested that you check the video you rip before you transcode it or burn it. The studios use all kinds of tricks to try to prevent this type of activity. He cited the case of the Wall-E DVD he was working with. Not only was there video scrambling to overcome, they had also made a bunch of decoy video files.
Posted: Friday, June 5th, 2009 | 
