Backing Up DVDs on Linux

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Backing Up DVDs on Linux

I recently needed to back-up some DVDs on my Linux box. In the past I used mac the ripper and handbrake on my mac mini to convert to xvid but am slowly weaning myself away from the cult of mac and onto Linux full time. I hadn't, until recently, found a decent way to transcode from DVD to other formats that was as reliable and rapid as my old tools. However I have discovered the combination of Vobcopy and Avidemux which are great for fairly straightforward DVD structures. When things are a little more complication then I have found other tools such as OGMRip, dvd::rip, and Thoggen. Vobcopy is a particularly nice little tool, especially the -l option that copies an entire DVD into a single large vob file, and the -m option that mirrors the dvd structure onto the hard disk. Vobcopy also has a particularly sane default that automatically copies the contents of the disk in the default DVD drive into 2GB split files in the current directory rather than just printing out a rather terse usage message to the terminal which is what I had expected when I tried it initially. One thing that I should have checked first though was that I had libdvdcss2 installed. The easy way to do this is to try to open the DVD in VLC. If it fails then it is probably not installed. I know that there are other ways to check whether this library is installed but a second element of this is that if the DVD plays in VLC then at least you know that you can access the disc correctly and check that things look good. Anyhow, because I had only recently upgraded my workstation to Ubuntu 8.10 I had not yet gotten around to installing libdvdcss2 on it, and I spent a while trying to rip a DVD before I realised why it wasn't working correctly. I couldn't see a simple way to install this via synaptic so resorted to googling for a solution:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/intrepid.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install w64codecs & libdvdcss2

Your DVD watching and ripping tools should now work on encrypted DVDs.

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Backing Up DVDs on Linux