Sunday, November 4

Ripping and Burning DVD movies under Linux

Arrrr….Video pirates spotted captain!

Foreword: This guide has been created by using this guide as a reference. You may want to do the same if you have trouble setting up the software.

DVD Decrypter and DVD Shrink are incredible ripping and burning programs. Not only are they user friendly, but they are extremely powerful. Their ability to rip and encode huge video segments in a reasonable amount of time is unparalleled. Unfortunately, DVD Decrypter and DVD Shrink have since been discontinued due to litigation (and superseded by ImgBurn). While ImgBurn is an updated application of DVD Decrypter, this guide will not go into it's installation procedure as it is most likely identical to this one. That being said, lets burn some movies!

Note: It is unlawful to copy DVDs without expressed written consent from the owner. Make sure you have this permission before you attempt anything in this guide.

First I had to check if the DVD drive is DMA enabled (for DVD Decrypter). So I commanded:


>hdparm /dev/cdrom (or whatever your cdrom device is named)


It should say 'using_dma = 1 (on)' as mine did. If it doesn't, you need to edit the hdparm configuration file to manually turn it on:


>
sudo vim /etc/hdparm.conf


Where it says /dev/cdrom (or whatever your cdrom is named), change dma = off to dma = on. Now save it and reboot. After rebooting, retry the steps above to verify that DMA is enabled.

I have written several guides on using Wine for games so I had it setup the way I wanted. If you don't have Wine, grab it:


>sudo apt-get install wine


Now I had to grab DVD Decrypter. After a quick google search I saw that mrbass had a link hosted. So I downloaded it:

http://www.mrbass.org/dvdrip/SetupDVDDecrypter_3.5.4.0.exe

After downloading it, I navigated to my download directory and ran Wine to install it:


>wine SetupDVDDecrypter_3.5.4.0.exe


I went through the steps and finished the install. In order to get DVD Decrypter to recognize the disk drive, I had to set it to use Windows NT in the winecfg:


>winecfg


Then I clicked "Add an Application" in the Applications tab. I navigated to ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/DVD Decrypter/ and selected 'DVDDecrypter.exe'. Once it was added to the applications list, I clicked on it then changed it's Windows Version (the drop down bar at the bottom) to 'Windows NT 4.0'. I clicked OK and that did it. Now I had to install DVD Shrink to compress that video and reauthor it for replication.

Note: If DVD Decrypter did not detect your DVD drive right away, make sure that you are using STPI. To do this, go to (in DVD Decrypter) Tools>Settings>I/O and Click 'STPI - Microsoft'. STPI is the only known interface to work with Linux.

To begin the install of DVD Shrink, I had to download a copy. Mrbass is hosting the software here:

http://www.mrbass.org/dvdshrink/dvdshrink32setup.zip

So I unzipped and installed the file:


>unzip dvdshrink32setup.zip


>wine dvdshrink32setup.exe


I went through the install steps and that was it! Now I had a DVD ripping and encoding combo to backup all of my movies.

Note: The newer versions of Wine includes all of the DLL's that DVD Shrink was missing. If you get some error that you are missing these files, you can download them here. To install them, copy the files into the system32 directory of wine:

>cp foo.dll ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/

For a guide to using DVD Decrypter, go here.

For a guide to using DVD Shrink, go here.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

I heard that is quite difficult to set the DVD and CD burner in Vostro laptops. Did you manage to use some Linux natve applicattions such as the ones in X11 (X-CdRoast), GNOME (Nautilus, GnomeBaker), KDE (K3B) or the command-line ones like cdrecord?

NC State Alumni said...

When I first got the laptop working I burned a few CDs with DVD/CD Creator in GNOME. Everything seemed to work without a hitch. However, I have read in a few other places that you may need to add 'piix' to the /etc/modules to get the drive to burn disks.

Anonymous said...

For me (also a Vostro 1500) I cant find my DVD drive with STPI, but only with the ASPI Setting. It works...

I'm using wine 0.9.55 on openSUSE 10.3
My Drive is an TCCTcorp TS-L632H

Keep up with blog. Great place to check on how things work.

Vincent said...

Do you know how to burn VOB to DVD?