Tech Tips

"Ripping a DVD"

A little background in case you haven't even "ripped" a music CD yet. "Ripping" (also referred to as digital audio extraction) is the process of copying the audio or video data from one media form, such as DVD or CD, to your hard drive. "Ripping" conserves storage space. For people like me who move around a lot it's a lot easier to carry a small hard drive (the size of a deck of cards these days) with all my movies than to carry around a case with 200 DVDs. The "ripped" music or movie files are usually encoded in a compressed format such as AAC, MP3, WMA, FLAC or Ogg Vorbis for audio, or for video the formats are typically MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, XviD or Ogg Theora. The are all great formats - MP3 clearly the most popular audio format presently - and DivX and Xvid seem to be duking it out on the video front. Most people have heard of MP3 - they just don't realize it's an abbreviation for a file compression format - that just doesn't sound sexy at all when you say it out loud.

Download & Install AutoGK (Auto Gordian Knot)

1) Click below to download the Auto Gordian Knot (v2.45) Setup Program or "AutoGK Full Package":
http://www.autogk.me.uk/index.php?name=Downloads&d_op=getit&lid=2

Double-click on the file above wherever you downloaded it to, so that it will install.

2) Once the above is installed, click here to download the AutoGK Update Program or "AutoGK Beta":
http://www.autogk.me.uk/index.php?name=Downloads&d_op=getit&lid=10

Then double-click on the Update Program, wherever you downloaded it to so that it launches and installs also.

If the links above do not work for any reason, use the following link to the AutoGK download page and look for the most current, stable “setup” program named "AutoGK Full Package" and the “update” program named "AutoGK Beta". Any "mirror" site that works is fine - the addresses change for stuff like this so not all mirrors work all the time - try a few if you have to. You'll find a working one.

http://www.autogk.me.uk/modules.php?name=Downloads

AutoGK certainly isn’t the only game in town – I just happen to like it. It’s free and it has worked for me in the past. But, if you want to check out some of the more popular alternatives available on the market with better interfaces: Nero; or Roxio Easy Media Creator or even Roxio Toast (Mac).

AutoGK Tutorial/Instructions

You'll notice they say it's not unusual for a DVD rip to take 4-8 hours - depending on your PC hardware. Check this page to make sure you have adequate hardware – but let me just note that you should probably have 10GB of free hard drive space before you do this – these files fill up the drive considerably while the ripping process is happening but then in the end only take up about 1-2 GB.

Tutorial ->> http://www.autogk.me.uk/modules.php?name=TutorialEN

Steps for Ripping DVDs

The above tutorial page has a great deal of information to sort through and takes you through step by step in great detail. I’m going to take you through the fewest steps/choices below to try and keep it simple:

Once you click Start | AutoGK | AutoGK the following AutoGK pop-up or dialog box appears. I’ve put little hands pointing to the items I’m going to discuss on the large picture that follows below.

Let’s Get Started:

First, we have to pick an input and output file.

Choose the Input File (or .IFO):

Click the little folder icon to the right of the input file line

Now, navigate to the DVD drive on your computer. You can see in the picture below that my drive is “D” because the address begins with “D:\”

Now, really this is the trickiest part of all – once you get this down, the rest is smooth sailing.

We have to choose the correct .IFO file on the DVD out of the dozen or so choices. You’ll notice in the picture below that I’ve chosen the file named “VTS_02_0.IFO”. There were actually about 10 .IFO files to choose from and you’ll have a few as well. But, only one of them is probably correct so how do you know?

Start with the first one, because luckily it’s almost always one of the first three.IFO choices. It’s usually “01” or “02”. Don’t be concerned if you get an error from picking some of them – that just means it’s the wrong one.

So how do I which one is the correct IFO? know the movie on this DVD is about 2.5 hours long so I’m looking for the .IFO that is about that length. Below the “Output” part, in a gray box, you can see the video info and the length of my movie reads “02:29:11” or two hours, 29 minutes and 11 seconds. Each IFO you choose, will change that video info box.

Many of the IFO choices will only have a length of a few seconds or minutes so it won’t be a close choice. The Peaceful Warrior choice was off by a few minutes (based on the DVD case) but I know that’s close enough – that’s got to be it – it’s never exact but you’re looking for the closest one.

Choose or Name the Output File:

This is easy – you can see that I created a folder called “AutoGK Output” in “My Documents” and named the file “Peaceful_Warrior” because that’s the movie name, right?

In Step 3 (above picture) you can leave the selected output size as “2 CDs” unless you want to play with this. It creates a part one and part two of anything you rip so you can always divide a movie up between two CDs if you wish later on. Note: it will also create a single file of the movie 1.5 GB in size – this is by default. If you’re comfortable with larger file sizes you could keep the single and delete the part one and part two. But, that decision is for the very end.

In Step 4 (picture above) click “Advanced Settings” and make sure the following default choices are the same as you see in the picture below, then click OK – we want both “Auto” choices at the top and then the “Xvid” codec because it’s more universally recognized by different media players on more PCs.

Pictured below:

Lastly, click the “Add Job” button in the lower right and then you’ll see a new listing in the “Job queue” below that.

You’ll see in the picture, mine begins with “C:\Documents and Settings…” etc.

Now, click “Start” and away we go … you now have time to listen to what I think could possibly be the best album ever made. You can probably listen to it six times by the time this is done ripping – but that just might just do you some good:

It will tell you how long it took to rip the DVD when you’re done so you can plan for next time. On my Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop (2GB), it takes between 5 and 6.5 hours for a full length movie.

Notes:

§ If you minimize AutoGK while it’s running so you can work on something else while it's doing its job, you have to double-click on AutoGK in the system tray in the lower right corner to bring up the dialog box again - for example if you want to check status of the job or tell it to quit. Here’s a picture of what I’m talking about – it’s the first icon on the left actually. It's the Gordian Knot icon from the top of this page - that's their logo

§ Once it’s done there are three relevant .avi files in that output folder you created that you should look at: a single file large copy and then two files that are each half that size (your part 1 and 2). Keep either the single larger file or the two parts and then delete everything else in that folder. Obviously you don’t need both versions and your hard drive might not be big enough for everything. Anything else in this output folder is junk and should be deleted after each “rip”.

§ Problems playing a video you've made or any video for that matter? Now, Windows Media Player or whatever default media player you're running should be able to handle an .avi file. But, if you need an all purpose "swiss army knife" of media players VLC Media Player is the place to start. It's free software that runs on just about every computer there is and it plays almost any video or DVD for that matter you can throw at it. What's not to like? VLC Media Player is released under the GNU General Public License. Read more about it if you're interested or just go to the VLC Media Player Download Page and get a copy. If you ever encounter a video that Windows Media Player can't open or you're having trouble with, give VLC Media Player a try - I highly recommend.