DVD2MPG Guide
A piece of advice first: This method takes incredibly long. Furthermore you have to keep in mind that when you're ripping directly from the DVD, you're drive will constantly spin up and down, and it's possible that this will reduce the lifetime of your drive. But this method is a 100% safe one, if you can get the tools working and it will even work when the movie can't be decrypted to your hard disk. The program contains a really good help file and I won't bother telling you the same stuff, I will mostly give you some additional advice and I suggest that you read the readme carefully before using DVD2MPG.Step 1: Setup
DVD2MPG is basically a DVD player, but it's painfully
slow and you'll never want to use it to watch a movie since in playback
mode it can only display about 10-15fps (a movie has 29.97 or 25fps depending
on the TV system).
You can use the AVI Plugin for Flask in dvd2mpg.
To do so, rename the plugin which name is aviout.cm.flask to cm-mpeg-pwi2.0e.prm
and copy it to the folder in which you installed dvd2mpeg. You will have
to use an older version of the plugin since all the 0.15betas and 0.58
won't work in dvd2mpg.
DVD2mpg will allow you to rip directly from your DVD or from your hard disk. If you want to rip from your hard disk, decrypt whole movie - as in all files that are on it - to your hard disk in a folder called video_ts. This folder has to be in the root of your hard disk, for instance c:\video_ts. You may also have to make the DVD regionfree, if you're using VobDec GUI to rip just check Regionfree - on by default. Otherwise use VobDec or Zonefix to fix the ifo file.
Before using the program, you have to install some codecs. Go to the start menu, select programs, then select the DVD2MPG folder (assuming that you installed it using the standard folder name) and click on Enable Decoder. Then start DVD2MPG.
Step 2: Capturing the Video
In case you want to rip from your hard disk, select File, then Change DVD Root and select the VIDEO_TS.IFO file.
Here's
the main DVD2MPG window. Click on Options, Capture Setting:
On the left: Settings for an NTSC 16:9 1:2.35 movie, on the right: Settings for a PAL 16:9 1:2.35 movie
For 1:1.85 movies select 416 as vertical size. The framenumber can be calculated as follows: Movie length in seconds * framerate. Of course you can select 48000 Hz Wav if your soundcard can handle it.Then click on Playback, and Initialize Graph end Encoder. This will open another window and after some seconds the movie starts playing in that window. However it's painfully slow but that's perfectly normal. Then you'll get two messages, saying "1st test succeeded" and "2nd test succeeded". If you encounter an error message you might have forgotten to enable the filters prior to running the program. If you encounter a region error message, try using this tool( run it in the directory where you've copied the DVD). If this doesn't work, well then we're in trouble since I don't know any other way. When you're ripping from the hard disk, try to rip directly from the DVD. If this still doesn't work, ask in Oleg's Forum. The Author of dvd2mpg will eventually read it.
After
the 2 test messages, the Codec selection pops up. Select DivX Low motion,
then click on configure and set the bitrate as desired - use this
tool to calculate the bitrate - set keyframes each 1 seconds and crispness
to 100.
Then press Playback - Play to start playing the movie. Sooner or later the menu will pop up. You can navigate the DVD menu using the arrow keys and enter to select. But this will only work when the dvd2mpg window (it says DVD2MPG Squeezer 1.16 in the title bar, not DVD2MPG Playback) has focus (is the app with the blue top bar). You can also use the Special menu to navigate thru the DVD. Once you've selected language, subtitles, etc press Control-C to start encoding and again to stop decoding - of course the program will also stop when it has reached the number of frames indicated in the Capture Settings.
Step 3: Multiplexing
Then follow these instructions to multiplex audio and video. If asynch, the same as always applies: Try changing the framerate or use source displacement for audio.
Final words: This method is pretty much legal. If you replace the filters by the filters of your own copy of WinDVD - if you have one that is - nothing illegal is going on since you're just running a DVD player, sort of. Of course the DivX codec is only semi-legal but since the Windows Media Tools are for free it's probably ok to hack those codecs. Maybe getting those tools and hex-editing them yourself would be completely legal.