SwingDJs

Does anyone have any advise on ripping DVDs to a library. And editing the videos, for use to blow up on a big screen and DJ the video files. I can't even get to the first step I try to rip the DVD to an external hard drive using normal factory loaded software and I get an error messaging saying that there is no data recognized data in the burner. I'm wondering if there is copyright blocks on the DVD.

Anyone have any luck doing this from copyrighted material? What software do you use?

Mike recommended a conversion process at this link, http://www.swingdjs.com/phpbb2/viewtopi ... hlight=dvd . But link to which he referred us is now broken.

There are a number of commerically available products available for "backing up" DVDs. However, there are also a number of free ones. I've tested about 50 different programs and the one that works the best and has the most amount of options is DVD Shrink. I have used DVDshrink in the past to rip existing footage supplied(and owned) by a client so I can use it in a new project they've contracted me to do.

http://www.dvdshrink.org/what.html


Your question: do DVDs have copyright on them?

Answer: YES. They have what is called CSS (no not cascading style sheets - hahaha). DVDshrink will get around this - as will a lot of the ripping programs as the source for CSS is readily available and thus easy to break.


I produce commercial DVDs on a daily basis and apply the copyright. It will stop about 80% of the consmers ripping it, but there will always be the few that want to operate illegally or make "backups".

There are a number of apps out there that will let you edit your video. It just depends if you are using a MAC or PC. Windoze XP comes with windows movie maker (which you can use to create uncompressed AVI files and then convert to mpg2 for DVD later on). There are heaps of programs out there but I personally prefer to use high end commerically available products.

I'm happy to answer any other questions you might have.

You'll need a program that does deCSS, like AnyDVD to first read the disc.

To get at the individual files is a multi-step process that is actually quite tedious ... first you'll need to copy them to your hard drive using a program like DVD Decryptor. Then you'll need to convert the individual VOB files to AVI files using a program like DVD2AVI. Then I would reccommend using Virtual Dub to edit and recompress the AVI files into a format like divx. Note that you can process the video stream, but leave the audio stream intact. Since most concert DVD footage features LPCM audio streams, you'll definitely want to go that route and keep it as it is.

There are many issues in doing this - what are the interlace settings, which VOB files contain the actual footage I want, etc. I have tried this with a few of my concert DVDs and I've just found it to be too tedious, which is saying a lot considering I tend to be a very stubborn individual at times.

http://www.dvdapp.com/

and for more info

http://www.dvdapp.com/dvd_ripper.htm

Here's a different question, how do you rip audio from a DVD. I've got a DVD of several soundies that I would love to rip (the Shaw "Lady Be Good" shag soundie for example).

i've used mplayer to do it (there are linux, os x, and windows versions). you end up with a wav file. you can use your favourite encoder after that if wav ain't your thang.

googlifying 'extracting audio from dvd' yields quite a few pages that describe the process, so i won't bother going into more detail here.[/url]

Thanks, I'll try it.

I won't talk about legalities, because it's boring.

To RIP DVDs I used DVDRipper. Then I take those, and edit them with various tools. But if I just want to copy the whole thing and put it on a disc, i use an application called DVD2One, which basically re-encodes it to fit on a DVD-R media. Of course if you have a dual layer recorder, you don't even need to do that.

I have a DVD that I copied a bunch of Artie shaw soundies from too