Tools of trade - VobDec

The successor of DeCSS. DeCSS and Dodsrip have a list of decryption code and do not actually have to search for a key. However the movie industry, once it discovered the existence of DeCSS, was quick to invalidate a couple of the keys that DeCSS knows, resulting in DeCSS being unable to decrypt movies properly. Since I don't use DeCSS anymore I can't tell for sure but it's to be assumed that a considerable part of new released DVDs can't be properly decrypted with DeCSS. 

VobDec has another approach to decrypting DVDs.. the approach was never explained but if you're good enough you can take a look at the sourcecode. In any case, VobDec is capable of ripping a far greater number of DVDs than DeCSS, but not every title since it's keysearch fails some time. The greatest drawback of switching from DeCSS to VobDec is the fact that this is a command line tool. Many people still use DeCSS because of that and write annoying "my conversion program crashes upon starting, I have green squares all over the screen, etc" messages to the various forums. Clearly these people haven't been on a good ripping site, otherwise they'd know what's wrong. There are 3 major GUIs for VobDec which are widely used: VobDec GUI - which is present in my rippacks - cladDVD and EasyVD GUI. I have never used the third one and it's not on my site. Both VobDec GUI and cladDVD contain the necessary VobDec files so it's not necessary to download VobDec along it, which leads a large number of people believe that these two programs are actually ripping programs, but they are not!

VobDec comes with it's own manual and you can create your own by typing "vobdec > manual.txt". If you want to rip the whole DVD to the harddisk type "vobdec s". "vobdec x" is useless since it merges all the files available on the DVD. To rip a single or multiple files you proceed as follows: "vobdec vts2 1 6". This would rip vts_02_1.vob - vts_02_6.vob. vtsX indicates which titleset to rip and the first number the start file and the second number the end file. To rip only vts_02_1.vob type "vobdec vts2 1". You can abort the keysearch by pressing "S" and abort ripping by pressing "Q". 

The -0 flag disables multiangle handling which VobDec does by default. This is important if you use an ifo parsing capable tool to convert the VOB files afterwards. All these tools will fail VobDec removes the subtitles.

If VobDec's keysearch fails then you can use DeCSS plus or findkey: "decssplus f:\video_ts\vts_02_1.vob" or "findkey f:\video_ts\vts_02_1.vob" and pass it as an argument to VobDec: "vobdec vts2 1 6 key XX XX XX XX XX" where the string of XX's represents the key as found by DeCSS plus or findkey. 

During ripping you can also extract the ac3 tracks: For instance to rip vts_02_1.vob and extract the audio track 0x80 and 0x81 at the same time type "vobdec vts2 1 - ac3 80 81". 

Furthermore VobDec can patch the .ifo files to be regionfree when you use dvd2mpg: "vobdec regionfree" will patch the .ifo and .BUP files you have in the current directory. VobDec can also get rid of the macrovision flag: "vobdec demacro vts_02_1.vob" will demacrovision-ize vts_02_1.vob in the local directory.

There are also a couple of fileprocessing options in VobDec. For instance "vobdec lba f:\video_ts\vts_02_1.vob" searches for Cell IDs in the specified VOB file. "vobdec lba f:\video_ts\vts_02_1.vob output.vob" will search for Cell IDs in the specified input file and when a Cell ID has been found you'll be asked whether to dump that Cell ID to output.vob and in the enc you can also truncate the input file (not possible if the input file is on a DVD).

Then you can truncate a file at an LBA position by typing "vobdec trunc 12345 input.vob". This will truncate input.vob at the LBA position 12345. "vobdec strip 12345 f:\video_ts\vts_02_1.vob output.vob" will strip the input file from the LBA 12345 to output.vob and then ask you to truncate the input file.

"vobdec merge vts1.vob vts2.vob output.vob" will merge vts1.vob and vts2.vob to output.vob - this does the same as " copy /b vts1.vob vts2.vob output.vob" but it's faster.

Last but not least VobDec can strip AC3 files from a vob : "vobdec ac3 f:\video_ts\vts_02_1.vob matrix.ac3 80", which will dump the AC3 track 0x80 to matrix.ac3, and "vobdec ac3 f:\video_ts\vts_02_1.vob" will give you a list of all the AC3 streams contained in f:\video_ts\vts_02_1.vob.