Welcome to the Sextrivium

Backup DVDs

October 17th, 2006

I've decided I want to back up my DVD collection. But I don't want all this extraneous shit on my discs: previews, deleted scenes, actor commentary, subtitles (excepting foreign flicks), captioning, menus. Also, I think I'd like to remove any region-codes, dma encryption, and of course they need to fit on a standard, single-layer DVD you might buy at Wal-Mart for $1.

A few notes in case I need to refer or rerefer or rererefer to them:

Strangely enough, the ripping is easier in Windows. I had originally tried to install handbrake-0.7.1, but it involved too many steps and wasn't working for me. I knew that there was a robust Windows program called DVDdecrypter that had the DeCSS embedded and a whole host of options for using it.

I read about a program called DVDShrink, which would cut the size of your file down to the size of a single-layer disc. Much of my information came from Doom9.net, which truly is the definitive DVD Ripping / Burning resource (at least, for Windows users).
So I fired up WINE (v. 0.9.9), installed DVDdecrypter and DVDShrink. No native Windows DLLs were necessary for either program.

Getting DVDdecrypter (under WINE compatibility layer) to recognize your DVD burner

A guide I discovered.

1. Use winecfg to set dvddecrypter.exe as running under WindowsNT4.0.

2. Make a symbolic link from your cdrom mountpoint(mine is /media/cdrom0) to /home/username/.wine/dosdevices/d:

PLAIN TEXT

BASH:

1. #while inside ~/.wine directory
2. ln -s /media/cdrom0 -s d:

3. Create a symlink from your burner(mine is /dev/hda) to /home/username/.wine/dosdevices/d::

PLAIN TEXT

BASH:

1. #while inside ~/.wine directory
2. #note the double-colon
3. ln -s /dev/hda -s d::

4. Inside DVDdecrypter settings, search for drives automatically (you might also try restarting the program).

DVDShrink is basically self-explanatory. There is a tutorial (where else?) at Doom9.net. The program works nicely with DVDdecrypter or Nero, as there is an option to send the DVD files (basically the VIDEO_TS directory) to either program for direct burning. In its simplest form, it is no more than a three step process:

1. Decrypt.
2. Shrink (including removing extraneous data).
3. Burn.

>One more note: If you are using WINE, it is safe to ignore the error messages about DVDdecrypter being unable to lock the DVD drive for unique access. This would appear to be a bug in WINE.

Entry Filed under: software, media