Free DVD Ripping at 2017 take 2

After I chose my main tool of the trade for ripping DVDs at my previous post, I want to write down about my whole suite of tools for perfect DVD ripping and basic editing.

Before I begin I want to be clear that I don't want to talk about heavy duty video editing tools, where one has a video and audio timelines where he can edit every aspect of the video as well as add text etc.

In this post I intend to talk about the light video editing which will consist of the following functionality:

Ripping Process

  1. Ripping the DVD to the local disk - 1:1 quality rip (no transcoding done) (and all security measures on the dvd will be broken on this stage) - this stage is important as it causes the dvd to work for the shortest time, thus decreasing the wear and tear of the dvd.
  2. Authoring the DVD, which means removing unneeded sections of the dvd like languages which are not needed (removing whole audio streams from the dvd container), removing trailers etc.
  3. Now that I have only the needed video, audio and optionally subtitle I will need to cut the video, so if there is unneeded video at the beginning and the end, those can be cut for a smaller sized video file.
  4. Till now, I didn't touch the video content itself, meaning I didn't transcode it, which resulted in super quality, fast work (several minutes for the above work) but huge video files.
  5. Now is the time to work on that perfect but huge video file.
  6. Optional stage - pass the video over some filters like deinterlacing and cropping.
  7. The big reduction in size will come now, where I will transcode the video with a good codec using a low bitrate.

That's the whole process.


Now to the chosen tools, all of which are free (some even open sourced), constantly updated with a reasonable gui.

Tools to use

  • For stages #1-#2 I will use MakeMKV which will break any encryption, and allow me to copy a 1:1 exact copy with great quality (and size) to my local disk, while doing it super fast. (In the past this was the stage I used DVDShrink)
  • For Stage #3 I will use AviDemux (In the past I used VideoToVideo which is still great but wasn't updated since 2013), Just make sure that in AviDemux you choose "Copy" in the video and audio section in order for no transcoding to happen.
  • For stages #6-#7 I will use Handbrake or AviDemux
  • For more advanced features, though a steeper learning curve I would look at XMediaRecode and MediaCoder (which is super complex)

Summary

What do you need in order to rip a dvd, then optimize it to the smallest size while having the best quality ?
1. MakeMKV to rip it to the local drive and remove unneeded stuff from the dvd
2. AviDemux for the rest (Maybe Handbrake also for good measure), which means cutting unneeded parts, then transcoding the video for more efficient codec usage and I might throw in a filter or two.

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