1. Backup disk and remove copy protection

AnyDVD HD

AnyDVD HD does a good job removing the copy protection and backing up the disk to your hard drive. It is a proprietary piece of software, but I found that a lifetime license was worth the investment (about € 100).

Please note that removing copy protection may be illegal in some countries. In Norway (where I live) it is, to my best understanding, illegal to circumvent effective copy protection measures. As far as I see it, AnyDVD makes the copy protection on Blu-rays very ineffective. However, there are, to my knowledge, no court orders that defines what effective is. Removing the copy protection may therefore be in the gray area. Nevertheless, I strongly believe consumers should be able to back up their own DVDs and Blu-rays, and use software like XBMC to manage their media collection.

2. Identifying the movie streams

DBInfo

You may want to store the whole blu-ray with all its files and folders. I am however mainly interested in the main feature itself. To identify the stream(s) that contain(s) the movie I use BDInfo. The first and longest playlist normally contain the stream(s) that constitute the movie. The movie in the screenshot above was contained in only one stream (“00000.m2ts”). The streams are always located in the folder “[movie root]\BDMV\STREAM”.

If only one stream (.m2ts file) contains the whole movie, you may simply store this file where ever you like, and watch it with XBMC or any other viewer you’d like. If the movie is constituted of several streams you should use tsMuxer to join/append these streams in the order shown in BDInfo.

Please note that the .m2ts container does not contain subtitles and chapters. If you want this you could for instance use the mkv container. However, since I normally do not care about either, I just back up the .m2ts file.

3. Adding an AC3 sound track and removing unnecessary tracks (optional)

Eac3toAC3

Some players are not able to decode DTS sound tracks. As a consequence of this I normally add an AC3 (Dolby Digital) track to my .m2ts containers. This is done by first encoding the DTS to AC3 using Eac3to.

tsMuxer

Next, create a new .m2ts file by adding (muxing) the newly created .ac3 file to the .m2ts file from the blu-ray. This is done using tsMuxer.

While muxing the two files I normally remove tracks that I do not need. This may be languages, presentation graphics, or video tracks with lower resolution. To remove them, simply uncheck the tracks that you do not want.

Step 1.Installation

First, dvdbackup may be installed through Synaptic, or by typing the following into the command line: sudo apt-get install dvdbackup

Second, you most likely have to install a CSS library to remove the copy protection. This may be done by adding the following unofficial repositories to your list of repositories (System->Administration->Synaptic Package Manager, then Settings->Repositories, and them on the “Other Software” pane):

deb http://unofficial.debian-maintainers.org/ lenny main contrib non-free restricted
deb-src http://unofficial.debian-maintainers.org/ lenny main contrib non-free restricted

You will most likely get an error message because of a missing key. Ignore this error message, or get the missing key through installing the package dmo-archive-keyring. Then you need to add the package libdvdcss2.

Third, Handbrake does not have an official stable release for Ubuntu at the moment. However, the nightly build has been working very well on my computer. To install this build follow these instructions. In short, add the following two repositories, and install the package handbrake-gtk.
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/stebbins/handbrake-snapshots/ubuntu lucid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/stebbins/handbrake-snapshots/ubuntu lucid main

Step 2. Ripping with dvdbackup

I use the command line tool dvdback up to make a copy of the DVD on the hard drive. The copy does not have any copy protection. To do this, start the command line, and go to the folder where you want the image to be stored. Then, type: dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -M

dvdbackup - screenshot

I have experienced some problems with the name of the dvd drive, but /dev/dvd/ usually works. If not, find the right name under /dev or /media. As you might see from the image above, you could receive some error messages. Do not worry about these. They are ignored sectors that are part of the copy protection. Ripping a full DVD usually takes about 15 to 20 minutes on my computer.

3. Transcoding with Handbrake

Transcoding the movies and series from the DVD format (usually a VIDEO_TS folder with several VTS_**_*.VOB files) to a single video file is very simple. First, set up Handbrake the way you want. Personally, I do not include subtitles, select the MP4 file format, and use the “High quality” preset. However, you may play around with the settings any way you like.

HandBrake - Screenshot

Second, Select “Source” in Handbrake (see the screenshot above), browse to the source folder of one DVD, and click “OK”.

Third, Pick the “Title” you want to encode. give it a sensible name, select the folder where you want to store the transcoded file, and click “Add to Queue”. The longest title is automatically selected. For DVDs with movies, the longest title is usually the movie itself. For TV series, make sure that you add all the episodes on the disc to the queue.

Fourth, when you have added all the movies you want to transcode, simply click “Start” and let your computer do the job. On my machine (AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black with 4 GB RAM), transcoding a movie takes about 45 min to an hour with the hiqh quality settings. On an AMD Athlon X2 4850e with 4 GB RAM, it takes significantly longer.

The next step

When Handbrake finishes you will have a collection of transcoded movies and series. In future post, I will show how I manage these using another set of open source software.

Disclaimer

Ripping and transcoding (copyrighted) DVDs may be illegal in some countries. In Norway, where I live it is not illegal to break “weak” copy protections like CSS (the copy protection used on DVDs). Distribution of copyrighted material is still illegal in Norway and most other countries, so please don’t do it.

In this post I show how I digitalized my CD collection on Linux (Ubuntu with Gnome) using Asunder and Grip to rip and encode lossless Flac files, and EasyTAG to edit the files’ ID3 tags.

Ripping format: Flac

I had previously read Martin’s post (in Norwegian) about backing up his music collection and I was inspired by some of his choices. Like Martin I wanted a lossless copy of the CDs which could be converted to any other format. I also wanted a format which is open. Therefore, I decided to go for Free Lossless Audio Compression (FLAC). Another benefit of Flac is that the files are smaller than uncompressed wav files. The files are however larger than for instance mp3 files but these are not lossless.

Flac plugins for several media players can be downloaded from the Flac page at SourceForge. As a media player on Windows/Linux I have up until now been using VLC quite a lot. VLC comes with a built in Flac plugin so no extra plugin is needed.

Ripping and encoding tool for Linux: Asunder/Grip

I started off ripping and encoding CDs with Winamp. Winamp is as the name reveals for Windows and it is not open source. It works quite well but the freeware version has a 8x CD-ripping cap. Not that it is a big problem but I wanted to find something for Linux which is open source.

Grip Flac encoder settings

The first alternative I found was Grip. Grip is available through the Ubuntu repositories so installing it is easy. When I fired it up it complained that the flac encoder was missing. This is nothing a “sudo apt-get install flac” can’t fix. I also had to set the path for the flac encoder (see the screenshots above). One is also able to set several options using the flac command line. I left the default settings more or less untouched but you have all the options at your fingertips.

After a bit of configuration I was off to a running start. I decided to use Flac, enable ID3 tags, keep upper case file names and spaces rather than underscores. I guess this is something I am used to after using Windows for a long time.

There is however one thing to complain about. Grip frequently crashes when I am trying to rip certain CDs. I really don’t know why but I think they are CDs with multimedia content as well. This means I can’t use Grip for all my CDs. However, I really liked Grip and if you do not experience these problems I would warmly recommend it.

Edit: The problem with Grip seems to be related to the ID3v2 tags on some CDs and it is already registered as a bug. Turning off the ID3v2 tags was at least a workaround for me.

Sound juicer configurations

Then I tried Sound Juicer (Audio CD Extractor) which is a simple and easy to use ripping tool. It worked really well, ripped all the CDs I tested, and stored them as Flac. However, it lacked some of the flexibility I want when it comes to customizing file and folder names. It was moreover not possible to create playlists automatically. If you need as simple tool I would warmly recommend Sound Juicer.

Asunder

The third one I tried was Asunder. This was another simple tool but it has somewhat better file name configuration options than Sound Juicer and it created playlists automatically. It has not crashed so far and it does what it should. The configuration was not as detailed as Grip’s but it had the most important options. I would have preferred to have them all but Asunder actually worked on my computer with most CDs. Ripping and encoding was therefore done with Asunder when Grip did not work.

Another alternative is XMCD but since Asunder was working I did not bother to check it out. This blog entry and this Wikipedia entry suggests a few other tools you might want to check out if you want something else. You may also want to check out one of these guides(one, two)which shows you how to rip and encode a CD as flac using the command line only. This looks tempting since you will get some of the configurability which I miss with Asunder.

ID3 editing tool for Linux: EasyTAG

All of the tools mentioned above contact an Internet database to download information about the discs and tracks one rips. This information is then stored in the flac-files ID3 tag. This is very convenient but the information is unfortunately not always correct and sometimes it is not formated the way you want it. To edit the ID3 tags of a large number of files one will need some tool support because doing it manually is just too time consuming.

EasyTAG user interface

I have for a long time been using mp3tag on Windows and I am really satisfied with it. It is unfortunately not available for Linux so I had to look for another tool. I found EasyTAG through the Ubuntu repository. Even though the user interface could have needed a overhaul it seems to be doing its job and I decided to go for that. It offers the functionality I need (rename files, folders, and automatically get tags from file/folder names). It is also possible to search an online database for updated tags.

I am sure there are other options but EasyTAG seemed to satisfy my needs and I did not bother to look further.

Future work: media center software, encoding for portable players, and DVD backup

After ripping my CDs I need to first look into arranging the music with a new media player/music library. Next, I need to find something for encoding it in a somewhat more compressed format for portable mp3 players. Then I would like to look into ripping the DVDs I have as well. After building a gaming media centre for the living room I need to put it into proper use.

If you have any hints or comments please leave me a message.

Disclaimer

Ripping CDs and DVDs for personal backups is permitted according to Norwegian law. Other countries may have different legislation when it comes to copying/taking backup copies of copyright protected intellectual property like CDs and DVDs. Do not use this guide to copy/spread copyright proctected material illegally.