Disclaimer: Once again, I take no responsibilities for what you do, and how you do it.

Introduction: There are two different tutorials here. How to rip DVD's to SVCD's, and how to rip DVD to DVD. The big difference is SVCD will take 2 CD's per movie, or 1 CD per episode (for a 1 hour TV show). You will lose all extra DVD content, and it will take approximately 6-8 hours to complete. By contrast, ripping to a DVD will cost twice as much, but in a worst case scenario, it will finish in well under 2 hours. I figure, the extra cost for the DVD is made up with "ease of use", all DVD content is transfered, and power saved not leaving your computer on overnight.

DVD to SVCD

Step 1: Getting the software

There are only 2 pieces of software you need to get started, DVD2SVCD and TMPGEnc. The DVD2SVCD program is the main interface, and it will call TMPGEnc on it's own, when it needs it. Other programs like DVD X Copy are bogus junk that only rip home movies. Waste of time and money.

Step 2: Setting up the software

1. Start off by installing TMPGEnc and then DVD2SVCD. After they are both installed, Start up DVD2SVCD. It starts with the "about" tab that gives you simple directions. We will take it a step further.

2. Let's start at the "DVD Rip" tab. Select a final folder for "Rip to folder". Here is something to keep in mind: it will drop all it's "building" files into here. For a 2 hour movie, make sure you have at least 10 gigs available for these temp files, and another 2-3 gigs for the final ripped movie. If you can spare 15 gigs, you will be golden. If you don't make the space now, you will regret it later.

3. On the Encoder tab, you will select TMPGEnc and point to the folder you installed it into. For the sake of speed, I recommend changing the "Motion search precision" pulldown to "Normal". I had run a test and found that it would take about twice as long to rip at the next setting, and personally, I didn't see the payoff.

4. Next, scan across the tabs DVD2AVI, Audio, Framserver, Bitrate, Matrix and Pulldown. You don't need to change anything, but make sure the files it creates are all going to the same, correct place. You may then continue with bbMPG, Subtitles, CD Image, Finalize, and Misc to make sure you are going to the correct output folder. Personally, I made them all the same folder to ensure everything was in one place. In doing this, it would be easy to cleanup afterwards.

Step 3: Ripping the DVD

1. Finally, lets do some ripping! Put in the DVD you want to rip and hold down the "Shift" key on the keyboard. This will stop the DVD from actually loading anything. In this example, I will be using a Soprano's DVD for 2 very good reasons. One, it was sitting on my desk. Two, it happens to be broken up into separate tracks and chapters. I can explain to you how to pull down different episodes that may be located on a DVD.

2. On the "Conversion" tab, click on that little CD Button. It will then scan the DVD, and pull in all available information.

2. For simplicities sake, if you want to rip the one movie on a DVD, you can skip to step 3.

2a. In this case, I will explain how the DVD is broken up. If you click on "Movie Length" it will pop up with all the different Chapters within the Track. In this particular case, the 00:56:35 is referring to the first episode on the DVD. It is then broken up into each chapter, showing how many minutes it runs for.

2b. If I click on the "Track Length", you can then see all 4 episodes. You may only rip one at a time, so select the episode you want, and off you go.

3. If you are happy with all your settings, click on that big "Go!" button. You have to make one easy, but big decision. If you want to rip and encode the DVD in one shot, select "Rip and convert" and go to bed for the night. It will take 6-15 hours to rip the one 2 hour movie. On the up side, no further intervention is required until you burn the disk in step 4.

3a. You may, however want to select "Rip only". This will pull the information off the DVD, but not encode it at all with TMPGEnc. Why would you want to do this? Well, speed could be one factor for you. If you are more concerned with getting the disk back to the video sto....I mean, shelf in your cabinet where you found it, rather than doing the whole thing in one shot. For me, I use it solely because my DVD player is on a 1ghz laptop with only 9 gigs free on a good day. It is sorely underpowered. What I do, is rip it off the DVD, then copy the 7 gigs over the network to my main machine. I can then let my Powerhouse encode it without time or space being an issue.

3b. If you selected "Rip only", you can then encode the file manually by re-running DVD2SVCD again. this time, rather than using the DVD, you can manually select the file that has already been ripped and is sitting on the hard drive. technically, you are re-doing the work you just did, but I suggest this for two reasons. One is that the Hard Drive is much faster than your DVD player, so it won't take that long at all. The second reason is that it's the simple and easy way of doing it.

4. So, once the dust settles, you have a folder that looks like this one. The only things you are interested in are the *.bin and *.cue files. Open up your favorite burner, let's say Nero, go to File, "Burn Image" and select the *.cue file. A few minutes later, you have a fully functional SVCD backup of your DVD. Once your sure it all worked ok, you can throw out the whole folder. In the picture shown, it took 134 megs and about 8 minutes for a 1:30 second track ripped on the laptop.

Conclusion: So, um... that's it, really. The very short version is 1. download and install two software programs 2. Setup your drop folders 3. Open DVD2SVCD and press the CD button 4. press the Go button 5. Six hours later, burn the .bin file. Now, of course this tutorial skips all kinds of details like scan rate and compression. Once you make one SVCD for yourself, you will then be able to reference other more detailed sites like DVDRHelp, DVD2SVCD and Doom9 just to name a few good sites.

Like anything else, there are a dozen other ways to accomplish the exact same result. Hell, I am sure many of them are even better. I just know this is a quick and relatively painless way to get you started. After you do one, it's much easier to learn the different techniques.

DVD to DVD

Step 1: Getting the software

There is only one program you need, DVD Shrink. It free, and you just can't beat the price.

Step 2: RIP the DVD

1. Insert the DVD, open DVD Shrink, and push the "Open DVD" button at the top.

2. Two minutes later, it will have scanned through the DVD and collected all the information. To run the program faster, always disable the Previews.

3. The left panel gives you a DVD directory, and the right panel shows the Video compression and Audio settings. In this case, it says that 100% will fit onto the new DVD, so no compression is needed, and you could skip to step 4. Let's use an example of 70% compression. I can get back more space by highlighting the word "DVD" in the left panel (as shown above) and unchecking French and Spanish in the right panel. That would be 240 MB saved that could be used for the compression. You can also remove the DVD's extras, but personally, I would rather keep them.

4. Push the "Backup!" button and tell it where it can put some Temporary Files. I also recommend checking the "Deep Scan" box. This will add 40 minutes to the Rip time, but the quality will be much improved. If no compression is needed, the option will be removed.

5. When it finished ripping, it will eject the movie disk, and ask for a blank DVD. It will then burn your new DVD copy. When it's all done, go in and delete the temp files it left behind.

Conclusion: That sure was easy, now wasn't it? I also suggest using DVD+R disks because your living room DVD player will have an easier time reading that, than a DVD-R disk.