DVD Ripping Project

March 15th, 2011

I’ve finished. After about three and a half months of near continuous work – our entire DVD film collection has been ripped, converted and is now stored on a Western Digital NAS drive available for Apple TV2.

Here’s how I did it.

Converting The DVDs
The one piece of software that I used throughout the project was Handbrake. Its available on both Mac and PC and rips and converts video DVDs (and movie files). It has a number of stored profiles for various players and hardware, fortunately I upgraded to the latest version just before starting out and this included a profile for Apple TV2. It worked perfectly, although I did tweak one setting – the audio compression by default is set to 160kps, which I thought was a bit low – I’m used to 256kps or higher when compressing music, so I changed the saved setting to 256kps for films and 320kps for my small collection of music DVDs.

DVDs have a number of titles and chapters on the disc, 95% of the time the longest title is the movie and this title is made up of approximately 25 or so chapters, but some new DVDs have been set up so there are 99 titles, each one the same length as the film – the one snag is that each title has a different running order of the chapters, they’re shuffled. This is to try and stop people from easily ripping the video content out of the DVD, but there’s a pretty simple way around it. I played the DVD through Apple’s own DVD software, once the film has started I clicked through on the floating controller to view the time left on the disc and then the current title that’s playing. I made a note of that title number and simply selected that one in Handbrake.

Depending on the frame size, aspect ratio and film length the films were coming out at roughly between 1.5gb and 2gb. This allowed approximately 500 to 600 films to be held on a Western Digital MyBookWorld 1TB (Amazon UK link) I’d purchased.

Sporadically throughout the project I used Ripit, this simple and easy to use software only copies the DVD content to your computer — they’ve recently introduced conversion to video files but this is still in beta — I then went back to Handbrake and converted the ripped DVD content to a Apple TV2 video file. Why did I do this? Well, converting a file straight from the DVD in Handbrake takes about 2 hours, ripping the DVD content using Ripit only takes about 25 minutes – so I was able to stack up a queue of DVD files to convert in Handbrake and leave it running over night, sometimes getting through 5 or 6 in one go. This definitely helped speed things up.

iTunes
Once the files were ripped and converted, they were imported into iTunes. I used the ‘alt’ trick to create a brand new iTunes profile on the NAS drive – now, whenever I want to watch I film I just open iTunes while holding down the alt key which gives me the option of choosing which iTunes folder I want to use.

I used a couple of websites to obtain the cover artwork for the files, Get Video Artwork was definitely the best, it had the majority of the covers needed for our collection – it also has variations for some films as well as the iTunes version for many. Other websites used (if Get Video Artwork didn’t have the image needed) were CD Covers.cc and Google Image Search – although if you’re using Google, make sure large files is selected and search using “dvd cover” or “dvd cover art” after the name of the film.

About half way through the project I came across MetaX for iTunes, this plugin allows you to add and edit additional video specific meta data for video files. Tags such as actors and certificate / rating aren’t available to be set in iTunes, so this is needed. MetaX will grab data from websites such as Amazon and IMDB. It’s a shame I found this mid way through the project because I’ve only used it on a couple of films so far – it takes a long time to save the files after being edited – I just don’t have the patience to go through all the films at the moment.

One trick I did work out was the sorting fields in iTunes, by adjusting those I was able to align films in sequence – rather than alphabetical. Series of films such as the Matrix trilogy and Bourne films are OK as alphabetically they’re in sequence, but the Lord of the Rings films for example are out of order;

Alphabetically
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Should Be
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

So in the sort field I changed the three films to, Lord of the Rings 1, Lord of the Rings 2 and Lord of the Rings 3. I’ve also had to change the sort fields for the Batman films and a few others.

While I’m on the subject of The Lord Of The Rings, these three films along with two of the Godfather films, Avatar and Schindler’s List were split across 2 DVD’s. From what I’ve read so far, Quicktime Pro is able to join the two movie files together without having to re-encode the files – which would compress an already twice compressed video. So it’s something to look into doing in the future. Until then – here’s some stats…

Tags: apple tv, apple tv2, dvd, dvd conversion, handbrake, itunes, mac os x, metax, rip, ripit, western digital