•  Windows 98
•  Windows 2000
•  Windows XP

Technology marches on... One of the very first "how to" articles I posted on this site was about ripping DVDs to the PC-friendly MPEG-1 format. Back then, DVD burners were still quite new (and rather expensive); few people had them. Also back then, many new encoding techniques were being introduced. XviD didn't exist yet and although DivX was rapidly gaining in popularity, it was hardly the only choice for video compression.

Fast forward a couple of years. Many people now had DVD burners and I was often asked about copying DVDs.... so much so, in fact, that I wrote this article about copying DVD discs.

While copying DVD discs is all well and good, sometimes you just don't want to copy an entire DVD. Maybe you have a portable media player you'd like to watch the movie on. Maybe you'd like to fit several movies on one data DVD. Maybe you're interested in "home theatre PCs" (HTPCs) and want to know how you can fit lots of movies on your hard drive. Or maybe you bought a new DVD player that supports DivX and\or XviD and want to check it out. Maybe you want to send a film to a friend that only has a CD-ROM drive and need to cram 4.35GB onto a single 700MB CD-ROM.... Whatever the case may be, there are a thousand reasons why someone might want to rip and compress a DVD. I typically re-encode DVDs for two reasons: to fit on my portable player and for convenience's sake (you can often fit an entire season's worth of a sitcom on a single data DVD using DivX\XviD, which makes for easier watching... no swapping out discs).

When it comes to video on your PC, you'll often find "purists" that prefer doing everything manually so as to get the highest possible quality. That's good for them, but for most of us, an "all-in-one" program like Auto Gordian Knot (AutoGK) can take ripped DVD files and create perfectly acceptable AVI files with only minimal effort from the user. This article will show you how.

To copy a DVD movie you will need the following:

Summary:

We will use DVDDecrypter to copy the DVD files to your hard drive.  We will then use AutoGK to encode the movie as an AVI file.  Lastly, we will (optionally) burn a copy of the re-encoded movie to a blank DVD disc using standard burning software.

Why?

Most modern DVD movies take up anywhere from 4.35GB to 8.7GB worth of disk space. For any number of reasons, you might want to compress this down to fit on a portable player or CD-ROM or maybe you'd just to save space on your hard drive. Also, modern DVD discs are made up of VOB files, which not every software movie player can handle gracefully. Converting DVD discs to DivX\XviD format AVI files creates simple FILENAME.AVI files that any media player can handle.

Assumptions

This "how-to" article assumes that you are trying to copy a "single format" DVD movie.  This is a DVD with either the full-screen or widescreen version of the movie, but not both.  Copying DVDs of TV shows (or other "short form" features) and DVDs that contain both full-screen and widescreen formats is a bit trickier and will be mentioned (but not covered "in depth") in this article. Also, this article is assuming that you're making backup copies of your own DVDs for your own archival purposes.

Please respect the copyright laws of your jurisdiction and DO NOT make backup copies of any discs that you do not legally own!

Step By Step:

1) Download and install DVDDecrypter and AutoGK.  During the installation of AutoGK, when you get to the "Choose components" of the setup routine, make sure that "Bitrate spikes control" is checked. Otherwise, accept all defaults for both installations. Also, if you haven't done so already, free up 12-14GB worth of space on one of your hard drives.

2) Insert a DVD movie in your DVD drive, then start DVDDecrypter.  You will see a screen that looks like this:

Special steps for ripping TV episodes (or other short-form video). Note that there are four episodes of the British show "Cold Feet" on the disc above, listed as PGC 1 through PGC 4. PCG 5 is only a minute and thirty seconds long and probably an "extra feature"; whatever it is, it can be ignored. You will have to rip each episode individually; I usually create a folder named after the show (G:\Cold Feet) and create subfolders for each episode (G:\Cold Feet\ep_01) and rip each one to its own folder. Episodes are listed in the DVDDecrypter window in the order they appear on the disc, which is usually (but not always) the order they appear on the DVD case. In other words, "PGC 1" is USUALLY episode 1, "PGC 2" is USUALLY episode 2, etc. Likewise, if the disc is supposed to contain episodes 4-7, PCG 1 is USUALLY episode 4, PCG 5 is USUALLY episode 5, etc. As we shall see, AutoGK is able to "batch" encoding jobs, so I recommend ripping every episode you want to encode FIRST, then letting AutoGK encode all the episodes in one sitting. It's a lot less work for you than ripping an episode, encoding it, ripping the next one and encoding that one, etc.

5) Copying the DVD to your hard drive will take around 20-30 minutes depending on the speed of your computer and the length of the film.  Once it's done you will get a confirmation message.  When you get this message, close DVDDecrypter.

6) Open AutoGK. Make sure that the "DVD input" radio button is checked, then click on the yellow folder at the end of the "Input directory" line and select the VIDEO_TS folder you created with DVDDecrypter (make sure that you select the VIDEO_TS folder and not simply the movie folder, as you will get an error message otherwise). Then click on the yellow folder at the end of the "Output directory" line and select a location to save the file.

9) Now it's decision time. Check the options available to you in the "predefined size" dropdown box in the "Select output size" section. You'll see various options for the final size of your movie. I can't tell you which one you should use, but consider using the following guide when figuring out which size to make the film:

14 ) (Optional) If you want to burn the movie to DVD, be sure to remember to burn it as a data DVD, not a video DVD. It's an easy rookie mistake to make.