Document Submitted by Trent Johnson.


First off I have to say that this guide is only going to get you the main movie off of your DVD. If you want the menus, special features, and all of the other fun stuff off of the DVD then you will need to use a program like DVDShrink for Linux. I haven't had the best of luck with it so this is what I am posting for now.

Ok so here it is. I finally figured out how to do this after weeks of trying different methods and many web site tutorials and guides. This is what I personally got out of them. It may be a little intimidating at first, but since I only like to read simple guides, that is what I am trying to do here.

Now, I am writing this as an Arch Linux guide just because that is what I personally use for my Linux distro at the moment. This can defiantly be done on other distros just as easily AFTER downloading the pkgs from either your distros repos or from there main web sites.

Programs used.
1. vobcopy
2. mjpegtools
3. transcode
4. dvdauthor
5. K3B
And all deps.

This first part is easy. Just pacman all the pkgs that you will need. Everything can be found on the Official Arch Linux repos, except vobcopy and dvdauthor which can be found on the EasyLinuxGuide.com repos. Just simply add the following line to your /etc/pacman.conf file:

[ELG]
Server = http://easylinuxguide.com/downloads/archpkgs/ELG

Once that is done pacman the pkgs:

**NOTE - I'm using K3B here because I have problems getting Gnomebaker to work which would be my first choice. If you prefer Gnomebaker to K3B and get it to work I recommend it over K3B.**

Now that you have the pkgs it's time to start ripping your DVD.

Vobcopy is super easy to use. This is why I picked it over say dvd::rip which I used many times with not so good results.

First things first mount your dvd to /dvd. The vobcopy documentation recomends /dvd over anything else and suggest that you could have problems if you use any other directory.

mkdir /dvd
mount /dev/hdc /dvd

The rest is super simple. I made this way too hard for a long time. Here we go...

1) Rip the DVD title(s) to hard drive using vobcopy and compress the .vob files into a single file with:

vobcopy -l -t movie

2) You now have 1 VOB file. We need to demutliplex it and get the M2V and AC3 files out of there.

tcextract -i movie.vob -t vob -x mpeg2 > movie.m2v
and after that:
tcextract -i movie.vob -a 0 -x ac3 -t vob > movie.ac3

This will produce a movie.M2V and a movie.AC3 file.

3) To requantize (shrink ) your movie so it will fit on a single DVD-R (4.7) do as such:

tcrequant -i movie.m2v -o movie1.m2v -f 1.5

This will produce a file called "movie1.m2v"

4) Now we need to re multiplex those 2 files into a compliant dvdauthor file:

mplex -f 8 -o movie.mpg movie1.m2v movie.ac3

This will produce a file named: "movie.mpg".

5) Now create a dvd structure in a folder named newdvd

dvddirgen -o newdvd

6) Populate the file system like so:

dvdauthor -o newdvd movie.mpg

7) Create DVD information (IFO) files:

dvdauthor -o newdvd -T

8 ) Burn the Video_TS and Audio_TS created with K3B DVD Video mode.

Easy huh? I can't belive I made this so hard for so long. I am however very glad that I finally figured it out. For some unknown reason I have yet to find these simple instruction all in one place until now. I hope this helps you as much as it has me. If you have any comments or suggestions please feel free to contact me via E-mail.