The video-dvdrip packages provides tools for working with DVD videos. With this tool you can make backup copies (in numerous compressed video formats) for personal use of videos that you own. Or you could copy the video onto your hard disk for archiving and watching directly. You'll need lots of disk space (a movie DVD contains up to 9GB and converting needs further disk space).

In fact dvdrip is only a GUI to numerous command line tools including transcode which does the bulk of the work.

The dvdrip command provides an intuitive interface and reminder of all the vast array of options available. Generally, load your DVD, go to the RIP Title table and obtain the table of contents. The largest one is usually the movie! If you are space restricted (less than 10GB say) you may like to do one or more chapters at a time. You can then begin the rip to produce a .vob file.

You have many choices for the format you would like to convert to.

Here is an example of taking a single chapter (happens to be chapter 19 of title 1 of one of my DVDs) and encoding in several formats (where there is a choice, they are 2620 kbit/s, but VCD is only 1152):

Type	Ext	Time	Size	Comments
VOB	.vob	2m	239MB	Audio somewhat poor.
SVCD	.mpg	23m	99MB	Very blocky.
VCD	.mpg	16m	51MB	No choice of kbit/s.
divx4
divx5	.avi	10m	94MB
xvid	.avi	10m	103MB
xvidcvs	.avi	10m	103MB
ffmpeg
fame
af6

But to determine the best procedure, format and parameters for grabbing a DVD into a compressed form suitable for hard disk storage is not a trivial exercise. For example, deinterlacing may be required, but it is (almost) only needed for material which was shot using a video camera, or transmitted for TV.

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