The quality of the screenshots on a forum I signed up to recently made me very dissapointed at my old ripping script (it was producing low-quality rips) so I decided to make a brand new one!

The aim was to make it easy for someone comfortable with a bash shell to use, and to take as much of the work away from myself as possible (automation).

The bash script: http://toribash.reversers.org/rip-scene.sh

I made the script using the HD x264 ripping standards as a rough guide, but I only have DVDs lying around, so it may not work with HD-DVD or BluRay discs.

This script will rip your DVD to H.264 video, AC-3 audio (with upto 2 audio languages, one of which will be English) and as many subtitle languages as you want. It will also grab the chapter information and place it all into a matroska (.mkv) file (which can hold all this information). You can play these videos with vlc or mplayer.

The important points are to run it with the -h flag first to find out how to use it, and that the video bitrate detection will choose the largest bitrate under 2100kbps which will yield a standard file size (not the best way, but it works).

The script does not output much (other than general information) to the terminal, but puts everything in logs which can be found in the temporary directory it creates whilst ripping (try tail -f on mplayer-log.txt to find out how much time is left for the current job/pass).

Feel free to play with the script (it is under the LGPLv3 licence) and let me know if you find any bugs or problems with it. :-)

You will need:

• bash
• mplayer/mencoder
• ffmpeg
• x264
• mkvmerge

This script is for BACKUP purposes only, and is not meant to be used in illegal ways. The script itself is not illegal (at least in the UK) but the use of mplayer possibly is (since there is no legal (in the US) way to play DVDs on linux).

Any discussions about where to find DVD rips or how to put the output of this script online for people to download will result in punishment.