DCEmulation

I asked this a few years ago, but I figure there may have been something new pop up in the meantime:

We have a lot of TV shows on DVD--everything from Buffy to Batman to Paranoia Agent to the Twilight Zone. We'd like to get these loaded up onto the computer, so we can drop selected episodes onto our iPods when we go on vacation and such.

Programs like Handbrake work great for movies and other programs where there is one "main" video on the disc, but what about multi-episode TV shows? Is there a ripping program that can easily and conveniently rip multiple episodes from a disc, without having to manually define the parameters of each target file?

Just as a note: we are only looking to get the episodes. We don't want the menus or bonus features, and we aren't interested in just dumping a straight disc image. We want something that can be dropped into iTunes' video library and transferred to the iPod without trouble.

CloneDVD?

Hrmm, I remember doing this a few years ago with Handbrake. Isn't there a batch command or window? If not there was a plugin or something that I used, but it was definitely with Handbrake...

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penor: hay gusy how do i make ubuntu look cool like vista

There's no across the board answer to this as DVDs aren't authored the same way every time like a CD is; there are multiple titles on any one DVD, they can be audio only tracks, menus and videos. These don't have to be in any particular order, so if you wanted a one click 'rip all the episodes and name them' solution, it would need to connect to a database of known DVD structures... Which is doable but nothing like that exists right now to my knowledge.

My method is to rip the DVD to my hard drive using RipIt4Me (PC) or Mac The RIpper (Mac) to remove any copy protection if it exists, then use Handbrake to export each individual episode to iPhone format. Generally Ill just go through the titles and queue up anything that matches the rough length of an episode, then I just rename them all by hand. It's easy if the name of the episode shows at the start, but sometimes you might have to google something like episode length. It's crap and not ideal but there's never normally more than about 6 episodes a disc, so it could be worse.

That would be fine if we didn't have very much, but I'm talking about ripping a fairly large library here. Off the top of my head, we have the full series of:

3rd Rock from the Sun
Adventures of Brisco County Jr.
Angel
Arrested Development
Batman: the Animated Series
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
The Critic
Curb Your Enthusiasm (season 1 only)
Dead Like Me
Dinosaurs
Firefly
Flight of the Conchords
Frasier (season 1 only)
Freakazoid
Fullmetal Alchemist
Futurama
Get Smart
Ghost in the Shell
Invader Zim
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Lois & Clark
Looney Tunes
Paranoia Agent
Pinky and the Brain
Planet Earth
Pushing Daisies
Samurai Champloo
Samurai Jack
Star Trek: The Next Generation
The Twilight Zone
The Venture Bros.

...and I know there are a few I'm forgetting.

Point being: it's going to be a massive undertaking already. If I have to individually look up and set the time parameters for each disc, it's going to take bloody forever.

Depending on the CSS encryption, I'd probably rip the episodes individually with DVD Decryptor, and convert with Xvid4PSP.

I hate to redirect, but here's a whole page of conversion guides: http://www.videohelp.com/guides

Maybe one will grab your interest.

-EDIT-
Looks like the previously mentioned RipIt4Me is a better option for removing dvd encryption. Although I haven't used it, so I can't vouch for it.

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I've been using HandBrake for movies, and it was fine for that purpose... but it starts getting more labor-intensive once you get into episodic content.

I looked into the links you posted. However, I should mention that most of the tools you listed appear to be Windows-only, and my machine is a MacBook Pro running OSX 10.5 [cue "Macs suck!" flames]

Have you tried vlc? It has a converter function, although I've never used it to rip DVDs.

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Use SlySoft AnyDVD to remove encryption.
It's somewhat expensive, but its really good.

I'm doing this myself right now. I'm using Handbrake and it seems to work pretty well.

lol you have 3rd Rock from the Sun on DVD.

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"He who cannot draw on 3,000 years is living hand-to-mouth." -Goethe

And what's wrong with that?

I'll be honest: I'd rather download DVD rips off of BitTorrent than do the ripping myself. I know, it's still illegal and no one should do it. But it's so much easier to watch your shows over the network than dig for DVDs.

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DMF, Using handbreak is honestly going to be your best option. I mean due to the size of your collection it really is your best bet to do what souLLy said. AFAIK, nothing exist like for ripping cds having them auto-tagd. To perhaps make it easier have you considered doing your episodes this way

Showname
-Season (or volume)
--Disc1
--Disc2
--Disc3
etc...

Because doing it that way you wouldn't really have to worry too much about naming them (at least for the moment) and yet you could still either download scans or do your own scans of the dvd art which should contain which episodes are on what disc. So, you'd have organization for a somewhat messy process that could easily be turned into what you want when you have the time.

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SCO=SCUM=M$=SCO it keeps repeating
i'm a randite
DYTDMFBSB?
There must have been some mistake
I'm not the one who should be saved
My divinity has been denied
Mary and me were both fucked by God

Good idea, but I'm too much of a perfectionist for that. It'd bug me until I'd eventually want to sit down and split them out anyway. Hell, last year I spent god-only-knows-how-long rating every single one of the 5000 song in my iTunes library, so that I could use the star ratings for activity-appropriate smart playllists. I DEMAND ORDER

I was just laughing because of how jealous I got.

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"He who cannot draw on 3,000 years is living hand-to-mouth." -Goethe

I frequent certain video forums, and I've found that people can do what you ask for a price.

If your willing to fork out some $, and your Mac is powerful enough, these two supposedly should do it.

http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/
http://www.dvdfab.com/

A Windows proggy running via VMWare...

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Hell, if you want to pay somebody to remote login to your computer (were both mac users so ichat would work lovely) and do the ripping I'd be more than happy to do it for you. I'm assuming this is something that would work best if you went ahead and ripped the dvds as isos instead of you being in front of your computer the entire time. If instead you would like to possibly mail me your disc and have me rip them so you don't have to do -any- work and not have your computer constantly under 100% load just let me know. If this is something you'd want to do just PM me and we can work out payment.

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SCO=SCUM=M$=SCO it keeps repeating
i'm a randite
DYTDMFBSB?
There must have been some mistake
I'm not the one who should be saved
My divinity has been denied
Mary and me were both fucked by God

I never had a problem using Handbrake to break down a DVD into multiple episodes.

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Bumpety bump.
If you have a Mac floating around at home check out RipIt, it will rip virtually any DVD you chuck at it (no fails for me yet), it will automatically convert to the format you want (iPhone, Apple TV, XBox 360, PS3), and it automatically knows episode numbers etc as it connects to a DVD database to check.
Can't fault it so far.
http://thelittleappfactory.com/ripit/