So let me tell you about my journey into the land of DVD ripping (now that it has been ruled legal I can talk about it). It started several years ago when I bought a nifty little Sony 505F laptop from a good friend. 2.9 lbs and a super small form-factor. (It is the one I replaced with my new TiBook).
The problem with it was that the processor was a wee bit limited (200 Mhz Pentium II) and so was the RAM (96Mb max back then). And I wanted to play DVDs. Only it didn't have a DVD player, or even an integral CDROM.
So what's a fella to do?
I got me some software (DVD Decrypter, FlaskMPEG, VirtualDub) and set to work. My idea was (after replacing the hard drive with a nifty 20g Toshiba unit) that I could rip my DVDs directly to the fast hard disk in my desktop unit (an AMD 2500+ with 120g drive and 512Mb RAM) and then I would use FlaskMPEG to compress the DVD content from 6+ gigs down to about 1 gig. The thinking was that the little processor that could in my laptop would have an easier job playing a film that didn't need to be decrypted on the fly (most commercial DVDs use copy protection) and that after compression the DVDs wouldn't take up much space. (As a side note, I should have stopped after decryption because the processor doesn't deal terribly well with the demands of DiVX decoding. As the saying in my family goes, I "swapped black dog for monkey".)
Little did I know what lay in store for me.
You understand that I'm not really an alpha-geek. I just play one on TV. So here I am learning all kinds of things that, while interesting, are not really going to better the quality of my life. Stuff like timecoding, dubbing, syncing, and video compression algorithms.
Did you know it takes far more work/time/CPU to compress the audio than the video in your average film? I don't know if it is because I typically am going from Dolby 6 channel (5.1) to 2-channel stereo but the audio track can take up a huge amount of room during the rip process, not to mention a lot of time.
I won't go into the intricacies of the entire process (it's still too painful for me) but suffice it to say that the ripping and compression process can take up to eight hours per DVD--with a very fast processor and lots of RAM.
However the quality of the completed movie is nearly indistinguishable from the original DVD. This still has a high utility value for me as it allows me to put half a dozen of my favorite movies on the drive of Dark Star (my TiBook). The DVD player in the 'Book consumes a good amount of battery life. I can really only play one movie off the battery, maybe two at a pinch. But reading directly off the hard drive extends my battery life considerably.
Besides, it's a fun journey into the interface between hardware and software geekdom. But if you're going to do it, take notes! When Windoze crashes, you'll wish you had.
Posted by artandscience at January 30, 2004 05:24 PM