€23.49 DVD coasters
A reasonable bit of advice from Bill Gates about music downloads and the "huge problems" with DRM is
"People should just buy a cd and rip it. You are legal then".My problem is with DVDs that no longer play - I have lots of DVDs for the kids that get watched over and over. Unfortunately our €23.49 Shrek DVD among others is a coaster. [Sorry, I exaggerate you can get Shreck for €11.28 at the moment].
In most countries there are laws preventing ripping CSS encoded DVDs (which is most of them) to a compressed video format like XviD - I guess you can back it up to disk in it's uncompressed form but who would do the equivalent of that for CDs. Useful windows dvd decrypter options get shut down . That's a Windows limitation in DRM enforcing countries but decrypting 40-bit CSS in other countries shouldn't be a problem on Linux or any OS with DeCSS support.
Suppose I where to get over the CSS decoding issue and I want to save the movie to XviD - Gordian Knot (GK) is a good option. It's described as an integrated package or tool for the entire process of DivX/XviD encoding. The installation process runs installers for the sub-projects of GK so there's a lot of interaction needed. GK includes a graphical video editor called VirtualDubMod if you need to remove some less interesting bits.
The ripping process is something like
- Started GK and selected the .IFO file.
- Preview may not work but I rip anyway.
- 2 hours 11 minutes you have a 1.4G XviD encoded version that looks great.