How to rip a dvd in Ubuntu (as .avi)

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Do you want to rip your latest commercial movie dvd to your computer, not just as an .iso but as a nice .avi?

Well, keep reading the guide and you’ll know how.

In this guide I’m using k9copy. There are others available, but I prefer this one.

It’s a qt app but it’s by far the easiest tool for the job.

1. Install k9copy

Install as you would any other application. The app is called “k9copy”. In a terminal that would give:

sudo apt-get install k9copy

NOTE: you will need to have the neccesary codecs installed on your pc. If you follow instructions here you should be fine!!

2. Open the application

I know, duh!

The app will be in “Applications -> Sound & Video”.

3. Select the sources

Make sure the correct input device (read dvd drive) is selected.

Then press “file -> open”.

A list of files will appear in the app itself.

Select the one you want (hint: look at the duration of the video).

You can press the little plus sign, doing that will tell you what is in each video.

Select the audio and subtitle track you want and of course the video source.

4. Encode

In the bottom there is an “MPEG4 Encoding Options” tab.

Press it.

You’ll see a menu pop up where you can specify how to encode the file.

I suggest to encode as xvid ( me and my playstation 3 love it :p ).

If you want to keep the dvd quality, leave the size it suggests.

If you don’t need dvd quality (for non lcd/plasma tv’s and non hd computer screens) you can lower this.

A 1.30h movie I would resize to 700mb.  A 2h movie to 950mb. A 3h movie to 1.4gb.

I am ripping an episode of my “Married with children” dvd, so I will resize it to 350mb.

In the audio tab I just kept “copy”, this gave me the ac3 audio track. If you prefer mp3 (lower quality), you can select it there.

Then press “actions -> create mpeg4″ on the top. Specify which container you want (standard is avi and I suggest you leave it as that) and where you want to save it.

K9copy will now start ripping and encoding the video.

5. Result

A nice 350 mb xvid video in an avi container sitting on my desktop.

6. Notes

This 23 minutes tv show took around 30 minutes to finish.

The better your hardware the faster this will go. This is where new high-end machines can really make a HUGE difference in the time it takes to finish.

I didn’t really have a huge performance hit while ripping/encoding.This again depends on what kind of pc you are on.

The subtitles seem to be encoded into the video. I am sure google will tell you on how to extract a subtitle source from a dvd in Ubuntu if you don’t like them burned into the video.

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