Well the world is moving on to Blu-ray and I’ll have to get one of these bad boys at some point (and replace my whole television too, the lovely 250kg monster that it is). In the meantime, backing up DVDs and so forth goes on. Here’s the workflow I use. Its a little old these days, but has proven reliable:
# “DVD Decrypter”:http://www.dvddecrypter.org.uk/ has since been discontinued, but there is still a mirro available. You set it to File mode to have it work with DVD Shrink
# “DVD Shrink”:http://dvdshrink.org. I’ve tried a bunch, but this freeware still seem to work the best. Basically, it reduces the files and leaves everything else the same. Run this in File mode to get the raw files
# “VOB2MPG”:http://www.videohelp.com/tools/VOB2MPG to take these files on your hard drive and convert them to a single gigantic MPG file. Or use “DVD Shrink”:http://www.videora.com/en-us/Converter/iPod/guide/dvd-to-ipod/ Leave the DVD in there and now rerun DVD Decrypter on the these files in IFO mode for it to work with iPhone or your computer. In IFO mode, make sure to check on Tools/Settings/File Splitting and set this to None and select the first stream. It does most decryption and then puts the VIDEO_TS files on your hard disk.
# “Videora”:http://videora.com works on the PC and it takes an unencrypted DVD files on your hard disk and converts them to iPod, iTouch or iPhone formats. You can also use this for PC viewing if you keep in mind the raw format of a DVD is 720x480i or in 4:3 mode what is called VGA X.264, so if you just compress to that, you’ll get about 700MB per hour for a high-def DVD. Or 350MB per hour for a lower def. So in Videola, for an iPhone, select the setting set H.264 480×320 768Kbps Stereo/128Kbps two pass. And for your computer, select H.264 VGA 1MBps/128Kbps.