Tools of TradeWelcome to a new series of guides. The tools of trade represent the "tools for professionals" for DVD ripping. Mainstream rippers do not use these tools, mainly because they are not fancy - most likely they can only be run from the command line - but they are very powerful and if you consider yourself at least an advanced ripper you should know them. If I just rip a movie to DivX I usually don't bother.. except for decrypting where I always use VobDec directly from the command line. But as soon as I have to perform somewhat more advanced operations, or if I need VOB sources for DVD2AVI, ReMPEG2 or any other not ifo-parsing capable tool and I have difficult streams containing multiangles or seamless branching then these are my tools of choice. Before we start here's how you find out which files are what on a DVD: assume that the largest .ifo file is vts_02_0.ifo. This means that the main movie is contained in the vts_02_X.vob files. For added material there's no such general rule I'm aware of. There's just one more thing: vts_XY_0.vob are always menus of the respective titleset. So for instance in our example case vts_02_0.vob represents the main menu of the movie. Another thing to that's good to know is the order of AC3 streams on the DVDs. AC3 tracks are stored in the 0xBD track in the 0x8X substreams, where X is a number between 0 and 9. The streams are numbered in the same way as they're on the DVD.. that is when you play back the movie in your software DVD player and bring up the language selection during playback - not the DVD's language selection but the player's language selection - they're in the same order.. starting with 0x80. And now for the guides.. mpeg2avi and ac3dec would also be parts of this list, but since they're pretty well described in the mpeg2avi guide I will refrain from repeating myself. Graphedit is also in some way a tool of trade, however, it's use for audio extraction is described in the Graphedit guide and it's use to encode to DivX is still very limited. However, with the next version of avienc this could change. |