Rip high quality DV clips from your DVD (Mac/PC)

[Elvira]

Don't worry, janeaustengirl23, it'll all fall together in time!

I don't think it's normal for there to be distortion with the audio or video of VOB files. I've never experienced that when I rip a DVD with DVD Decrypter. This is a mystery. Could you describe in more detail the kind of distortion you're getting?

[janeaustengirl23]

elvira, the image distortion that i am referring is similar to Simona's post on Page 2 (very top). Only certain sections of the copy looks like that so I can't use it. Each time it does that, I cross my fingers and hope that what I need isn't part of the mess up.

[Robby]

Can anyone recommend an alternate to Handbrake or Mac the Ripper for OS X? Each time i try to rip a DVD in Mac the Ripper i get a bad sectors dialogue box appear after it's finished ripping and i'm unable to open any .vob file in MPEG Streamclip or VLC, and Handbrake takes forever to do anything with my DVDs. When i take a look at what's it's doing via the activity window i find it's scrolling through a bunch of stuff and eventually it says 'no source found'.

Any others i could try?

Could it be that my DVD drive is set to R1 and i'm trying to rip a R2 DVD? I shall check with a R1 dvd and rule that out.

[Elvira]

Do you have a Intel Mac? The internal DVD drives are hardwired now to not accept foreign DVDs (at least not without switching the region on the drive, and as you know, you can only do that 5 times before the region is "set" permanently). You need to get an external DVD drive. (That's what I've had to do, since I also have an Intel Mac.) You're not going to get anywhere with Mac the Ripper or Handbrake with foreign DVDs in the internal drive, I'm afraid.

I got a Phillips USB 2.0 external DVD drive a few months ago, which has worked great for this, and it wasn't very expensive. I'd give that a shot. (Some external DVD drives might—MIGHT—be hard-wired like the Mac's internal drive is, to only accept one region. So far I haven't encountered an external drive like that, but it's possible they're out there. If you happen to get one like that, just set it to R2 and be done with it. The internal drive can be for R1, the external can be for R2, and you're all covered! )

[Robby]

Yes i have an Intel based iMac. My drive is set to R1 ( i have 4 resets left) so as an experiment i've tried a R1 DVD and Handbrake ripped it to a Mp4 file fine. I've even managed save it as a .dv via MPEG Streamclip and test it in FCE. So far so good.

You say Intel based Macs are now hardwired not to accept foreign DVDs. Does that mean it strips Mac the Rippers and Handbrakes ability to bypass the region encoding? I thought that was one of their primary purposes?

[Elvira]

It's bizarre, and I didn't believe it at first either, but apparently in the past, it was the software (like Apple's default DVD player), not the hardware, that alerted the computer to a region difference. (At least this is my understanding; I could have it all wrong. ) I know when one of my vidder friends told me that Mac the Ripper and VLC Player would not work in her Region 2 DVDs (as we are in Region 1 territory), I just thought she misunderstood somehow, but she told me that those on the Apple forum told her that with the new Intel Macs, the DVD drives are now somehow able to recognize a region difference and not allow you to play (or rip) DVDs. The only workaround was to buy another DVD drive. I've had to do that with my Intel Mac, but I tend to always like having an external drive anyway . . . but it is a pain in the behind, isn't it?

[Robby]

Tell me about it, that's crazy. I think in future i'm going to have to have to source most of my footage online. I'm not prepared to buy another drive just yet, perhaps once i've found my feet within FCE and i've got a lot of ideas for vids i will do in the future, but at the moment i'm just trying to get to know the basics, and faffing around changing the region of my internal drive all the time isn't going to do my any favours or help me in the long run.

I'm going to stick to R2 dvds for the time being and have a read up of what not to do when editing xvid/divx files.

Still, it's all a learning process i suppose.

[Elvira]

Yeah, I've dealt with downloaded files too, when there was no DVD available.

The best (most hassle-free) way to edit DivX/XviD files is not to edit them. Meaning, convert them to an "editable format" first. DivX/XviD isn't recommended for either Mac or PC, but Final Cut in particular has little patience for DivX/XviD (at least in my experience). I edited my first videos in XviD AVI (converted the DVD to that format—didn't know any different ) and I had constant rendering, rendering, rendering, bad picture quality (more than you'd think, considering the source footage), painful and frustrating scrolling through footage to find the right clip, and crashing. I finally learned to just open the XviD/DivX files in MPEG Streamclip and convert them over to DV MOV. It seems like a hassle, but you'll save yourself a lot of headaches that way.

[Robby]

Cool thanks. Good to know.

[sallangel]

Would it make any difference (or is it even possible) to convert the vid without sound (since I don't really need it cause I usually make music videos)? Would it make the file any smaller? (since my computer has pretty much no space to speak of) Or should I just mess around with the settings a bit? Or just throw my cruddy computer out the window? lol

[Elvira]

Yes, by all means, encode with no sound if you don't need it. It will make the file size smaller!

[nolaespoir]

I can just not get this to work properly.

Unfortunately I must admit that for the duration of my DW vidding career, I have been working with downloaded clips. I finally went out and bought the first three seasons and have now been try to convert them over to DV, and am not finding it a pleasant experience.

I got all the .VOB files ripped from the DVDs using DVD Decrypter (actually there were one or two .VOB I could not get ripped because of a scratch that was on the DVD when I got it, so I'm actually sending them back to Amazon to be exchanged for ones that are hopefully not scratched) and am now trying to convert them to DV Avi using MPEG Streamclip. I downloaded the MPEG-2 plug-in from it from Apple, as well.

I started trying to convert one epsiode and got an error (can't remember what it was) and MPEG Streamclip froze and closed up. It froze up again when I re-started it and tried to import the .VOB. Finally I just decided to try and convert a different episode and it looked like everyone was going just fine, it seemed to get all the way through the converting (my screen went "to sleep" near the end so I didn't actually see it finished), but now that it's done VLC sees it as a broken AVI, and when I try to fix it there's only the first 5 or 6 minutes of the episode there (even though I saw the status bar get to at least 75% of the way done) and Sony Vegas won't recognize the file.

This is taking a lot out of me. I have SOOO much footage to convert and I just wish it could go smoothly. Any suggestions, by chance?

[Elvira]

I'm sorry that you're having problems, nolaespoir! It seems like a few Windows users have trouble with MPEG Streamclip now and then. I don't know why! (Which version of MPEG Streamclip are you using? There's the beta version, and then there's the non-beta version. Just as a test, you might try the version you're not currently using and see if there's any improvement.)

But in any case, you don't have to use MPEG Streamclip: This tutorial shows some alternatives. For converting to DV AVI, try VirtualDubMod. It should work fine in Vegas, but your audio will not work. (This is a unique thing with VirtualDubMod. There's another process they use to extract audio, or else I'm clueless. Probably I'm clueless.) Also, you can convert to HuffYUV (excellent quality but a real drive space hog) in either VirtualDubMod or Avidemux. Again, the same issues with audio.

I think MPEG Streamclip is your first choice (if you can get it to work ) because it's easier to deal with audio, and also it deals with aspect ratio better in some video editors. But for Vegas, a DV AVI made in VirtualDubMod will work great—just remember to right-click, select "switches" and uncheck "maintain aspect ratio" and it'll look great. (There's more to the Vegas/aspect ratio thing, but that's for an upcoming tutorial! )

Anyway, let me know how it goes. If you can't get VirtualDubMod or Avidemux to work, then definitely let me know, because then it would sound like a problem with the DVD ripper.

[nolaespoir]

Thanks, Elvira.

I'll try the other version of MPEG Streamclip (I don't think I'm using the Beta one right now...) because I'd hate to have to go through and separately rip all the audio as well with another program, and then have to worry about syncing issues whenever I tried to use audio in my videos. Thanks for the tip, though! I'll let you know how it goes.

[Elvira]

Let me know, nolaespoir!

One thing you might try for audio (and this is very iffy, dodgy, not really recommended) is to convert just the scene you need with audio to HuffYUV AVI with Avidemux, using MP3 audio. MP3 audio is not recommended because it's compressed audio, and video editors do not like to deal with compressed audio (any more than they like to deal with compressed video). But, Vegas will recognize it. Maybe.

If all you need is one little clip here and there with audio, and the rest of the video is DV AVI, then you might try that MP3 workaround and see how it goes.

Also, check MPEG Streamclip's page for information about what to do if you have problems: www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-win.html

It also appears as if the beta version "fixes some AVI problems," so maybe that will be what you need!