An old article now but it might still be useful.

Introduction

In this tutorial I’m going to go through how to convert an episode of a TV show from a DVD into an XViD file for archival purposes or to just save space. The process seems daunting at first, but it’s actually quite easy once you know what you’re doing. The method I’m going to teach only involves three applications as well, and they’re all free! For this tutorial I’ll be working with the TV show Charmed (for my former girlfriend), as I didn’t have any of my own to do at the time.

Tools
First thing’s first, you’re going to need the tools and some other things:

- DVD Decrypter (for decrypting and making VOB files)
- MediaCoder (for converting VOB files to XViD format)
- At least 20 GB free Hard Drive space (for working)
- VLC Media Player (to verify the VOB files, anything that can open VOBs will do)

Since DVD Decrypter is no longer supported (they’ve continued development of it on ImgBurn) I can’t provide a link to it. Just use google! ImgBurn IS NOT usable for this purpose since they’ve removed the ability to decypt DVDs. Use google, you shouldn’t have many troubles finding it.

First Stage: Decrypting and making VOB files!
Put the DVD you want to process into your drive and open DVD Decrypter. Now we’re going to set up Decrypter. Open the tools menu at the top and click on “Settings…”. Open the “IFO Mode” tab and make your settings the same as these:

Once you have done this click OK. Now go to “Mode” menu at the top and click on “IFO” to enter IFO mode as shown below.

If it isn’t already, change the source to the DVD drive which has the disc you put in. We’re almost there! The next part has been known to vary from disc to disc, but it’s accepted that this is the most commonly used method, so I’ll only show you that. On the right pane you should see (in the Input tab) VTS_01, VTS_02 and so on. Expand VTS_01 like in the image below and you should hopefully see the same thing.

GC’s are Program Chains, but you don’t need to know about these. All you need to know is that the PGC is like a playlist containing all of the files involved in a whole episode, in order. This makes things super easy for us, because all we do is tell DVD Decrypter to rip the PGC and it takes all the files for the episode and puts them together into one VOB file. The resulting VOB file is the episode on its own, nothing more and nothing less. Just make sure before you rip anything that you’re seeing something similar to the screenshot above, with each PGC about the length of an episode of your show, and as many PGCs as there are episodes in your show and the chapters together properly. Once everything is right we’re almost there.

There is something I would like you to do now before we start. It isn’t hard at all, just use Windows Explorer and make a folder for each episode of the show on the disc. This is to avoid a lot of confusion later on, when you do other discs in the series (as each disc will likely use the same filenames). Once you’ve made a folder for each episode on the disc, go back to DVD Decrypter. The PGC number is a good indicator to what episode is what. In the tutorial we’re up to disc five of season 1, so our “PGC 2 [00:42:36]” is actually episode 17. Just left click once on the PGC (episode) you want to decrypt in the right pane and then click the Destination - Browse button (the folder icon with the magnifying glass) and browse to the corresponding folder. When everything’s ready, press the big button in the bottom left of Decrypter like the one below!

Hopefully you’re now looking at something like this (ignore the episode I’m doing, I took the screenshot later on):

At the end of the process DVD Decypter should come up with a message saying that it’s been successful! Now you can continue using DVD Decrypter to do the rest of the episodes using the same process, or close it.

Second Stage: Making sure it works!
Use Windows Explorer and browse to the folder you created for the episode. You should see a rather large VOB file accompanied by an IFO file, just like the image below. You can go ahead and delete the small IFO file, we don’t need it.

Open the VOB file with VLC Media Player (or any other program capable of opening VOB files). You don’t want to watch the whole episode now, just go through it and make sure it’s all right (one episode).

Third Stage: Making an XViD File.
Not long now! Open MediaCoder, and go to the “Action” menu at the top. At the bottom of the menu you should see “User Interface Mode”. Change the User Interface Mode to “Expert”. Now we’ve got all the options, we’ll set the program up soon. For now click on the button at the top which says “Add File”. Browse to the VOB file (episode of your show) and click ok. It should now be added to the list of things to convert. If you want to do a lot of converting at once, I highly recommend before adding anything to the list of things to convert that you rename each file to a unique filename (example “Charmed S1E1.avi”). This way all of the converted files will be safely outputted to the same folder without the need to worry about files being overwritten. Now it’s time for the settings. There are four main sets of settings that I will cover, if your show is in widescreen and you wish to convert it I recommend playing with the cropping settings or choosing a different resolution. These settings worked perfectly for my now very much ex-girlfriends 4:3 Charmed season. These settings can be accessed by going through the tabs on the left pane, underneith the list of files to be converted. Don’t set up anything until after you have left clicked on the episode you’re converting, so the settings are applied to it. Some settings are universal but some need to be set for each episode (like the output filesize).

These are the audio settings:

The important thing to note about the Audio settings, regardless of what you do is the “Audio ID”. This tripped me up at first, as the english language is usually on A-ID 128. MediaCoder defaulted to A-ID 0 which was Spanish, I think. Just set this to 128, or whatever the correct one for you is. I don’t know any others however so I recommend Google. :p I have converted another series which used A-ID 1 for english so be cautious and preview before you do anything to make sure that you have the language right.

These are the video settings:

There are a few settings for Video. First choose the output format, XViD. Next is Bitrate Control, which I set to “By desired stream size”. This let’s us specify the rough filesize we’re after. The box with the filesize in it can be whatever size you want, although I recommend the following:

22 minute show: 174,080 KB (170 MB)
44 minute show: 348,160 KB (340 MB)

Of coarse this varies for what you’re after as well, needless to say a higher filesize will bring with it a better quality output, while a lower filesize will have poorer quality. Use whatever suits your needs.

Container Settings:

Set this to AVI.

Picture Settings:

The only setting we’re changing here is the “Resize Video” option, which I recommend setting to 640×480, however this isn’t necessary and you can retain the original DVD resolution (recommended when dealing with widescreen footage). It’s on this page that you would set up cropping as well, just if you need it.

Hopefully now everything should be set, still in this left pane go through the tabs until you reach the preview tab. Use this to preview the source VOB file, just to be sure the language is English. Now quickly choose an output folder. This is done at the top right of the program, by clicking the icon and browsing. The output folders path should be displayed next to the browse button. Once you have verified this, at the top of the program go to the “Action” menu and click on “Start Transcoding”. If everything worked the way it should, you will see something similar to the below screenshot.

Something to note while you’re transcoding is that the process is VERY CPU intensive, and the time it takes to transcode (convert the file) varies from computer to computer depending on the configuration. On our AMD 64 3000+ it takes just over an hour per 44 minute episode. I would advise against doing anything too stressful on the CPU while it’s transcoding, however I feel web browsing and writing this tutorial aren’t too bad :P.

Once the process is done (wait for it to say it’s done) browse to the output folder and look at the shiny outputted AVI file. I recommend you to watch at least ONE converted episode per season of a show to make sure it’s up to your standards. If not just play with the settings and transcode it again until it’s suitable. If it’s fine, continue with the rest of the series or season. Each series or season could vary so don’t assume you’ll be using the same settings in either Decrypter or MediaCoder, but it’s a safe bet that if they’re from the *same* season or set they should be the same. Once you have what you’re after you can safely remove the VOB files and do whatever you want with the AVI files.

Congratulations! You’ve just ripped and transcoded your first episode! Here’s two screengrabs from Charmed, one from the source and one from the outputted file.. see if you can guess which is which:

(If you couldn’t.. the left one was the original :P). And just a sidenote, the first season has gone from being 6 dual layer DVDs to only 2 single layer DVDs.

- Original content by Juzza of DARKCOLD.