Capturing vs. Ripping

[cplevel42]

Quick question. I'm new to ripping DVD, but have been capturing from a stand-alone to my HD for a while. Can anyone who uses both methods do a quick comparison? Which method is fastest with the best quality?

I'm aware that if you capture, you will need to recreate the chapters using authoring software and that it is NOT a true duplicate.

[vic102482]

Well

just to give you an official answer, captureing is the easiest and the fastest. It is super flexible, it allows you to put movies like lord of the rings, and True Lies(<-- a b!tch to copy all that action) onto a single dvd without worry coversion or hassle. With Ripping your movies must be of a certain file size or legnth. But with ripping you get the "official" copy of the dvd with chapters and.....other ....stuff. ....(thinking).....oh okay I got one, with ripping you dont need to have a dvd player hooked up to your computer, you can use the internal player, and it also is faster than captureing because you dotn have to wait for the movie to finish.

[cplevel42]

OK

Ok, you mention that capturing is faster and more flexible, but at the bottom of your post you say that ripping is faster because you don't have to wait for the movie to end. Which is faster? Takes me 2 hours to capture a 2 hour movie. Then I spend 15 minutes recreating the chapters, and then I burn to DVD and that takes 35 minutes approx. Total process time. Almost 3Hrs. for a 2 hour movie. 3 Steps!

How many steps and how long to do a 2 hr movie when ripping.

Thats great to get the original chapters, but the "guess work" that is involved with ripping might be a pain (I dont know). You might not even get all of what you wanted from the original DVD, right. If the DVD is more than 4.3 gigs you will need to "Rip Out" most of the extras anyways. So this is not really a true duplicate of the DVD, just a duplicate of the movie. I would be willing to start ripping if it will save me time though. I'm not knocking ripping, I'm just trying to findout what the bennefits are other than retaining chapters and maybe some extra content (If the user guessed right)

[vic102482]

well it depends on the way you look at it

Ripping is faster for just making a copy of a movie. it only takes about 15 mins to rip, but then you need to convert, multiplex and yada yada yada, so it will defiantly in the long run take longer to rip a 2 hour movie rather than to capture a 2 hour movie. Quality will still be the same either way(depending on the encoder card)

[cplevel42]

thats what I thought, Thanks for the info!

I'll do some DVD ripping later this week, just so I know how to do it, but looks like I'll continue to capture from a set-top DVD since it much faster and the quality is the same. Why would I want to spend tons of time multiplexing and convertig? I don't like to tie up the puter like that. I would rather watch the movie and drink a cold one.

[maggot]

Here is my input. Take it for what it is. I'm no pro but it works great for me.
1. Rip the DVD with SmartRipper=15 minutes.
-Stream processing and demux to extra file(m2v & AC3)

80% of the time the m2v file will be under 4G and I can go straight to Authoring. If not....next step.

2. Launch PowerBit to see what Bitrate my M2V file needs to be in order to fit on a 4.3DVD-R. = 1 minute

3. Use ReMpeg to lower the bitrate. Varies,can take anywhere from 3 to 10 hours depending on your CPU and movie size and quality.

4. Then I use SpruceUp to author since it accepts Dolby 6 channel AC3 input.

DONE!

I usually let the ReMpeg run over night. No biggy. But alot of the times I don't even need to reduce it after I strip out the extra subs and languages with DVDDecrypter. Just rip,author,burn.

I may have left out a minor detail or two. but the basics are here.

[cplevel42]

I'll try it.

OK, sounds like a real time saver, that is if I dont go over the limit and have to use ReMpeg. I hope I won't run into that problem often. I'll give SmartRipper and DVDecriptor a try this weekend.

I have the feeling though that I will be sticking to capturing most of the time because of the flexability that goes with it.

As always, thanks for the insights.

[maggot]

I would stick with DVDDecrypter. I like that one alot better. Also, I just converted my system over to NTFS instead of FAT32. NTFS allows for files to be written in any size. FAT32 only allows up to 3.99G. The reason I'm saying this is because in DVDDecrypter you can set the file size to NONE instead of having it seperate the M2V's at 1G each. That way you only have to deal with 1 M2V instead of 4 of them. This makes it ALOT easier in case you do have to use ReMpeg.

[ebina]

What do you use to capture?

My captures are no where near as good quality as ripping.

[vic102482]

hauppauge mpeg2 harware encoder

cant beat hardware encoder cards

[cplevel42]

ATI All In Wonder 64 MB 8500-DV

ATI All In Wonder 64 MB 8500-DV (Works Great)