Rip DVDs to DivX on Linux 

If you are a Linux user and want to rip your DVD movies to DivX4, DivX5 and Xvid seamlessly, this article is for you. We will use a single ripping tool (DVD::Rip) to extract DVD movies and encode them to the compression formats mentioned above. All you need is a DVD drive, a DVD movie, an Internet connection and a Linux machine. You need to download files about 7 MB for it. We used PCQLinux 2004 with a full install. 

Download and install DVD::Rip

First, download this tool using CVS. To do this, open a terminal window on your Linux machine and issue the following commands.

#cvs -z3 -d :pserver:cvs@cvs.exit1.org:/cvs login

(Press ENTER when prompted for password)

#cvs -z3 -d :pserver:cvs@cvs.exit1.org:/cvs checkout -r rel-0-50-13 dvdrip

# cd dvdrip; cvs -z3 update

You need to download additional dependency packages, which will be used by the DVD::Rip. Download the packages as given in the box Download the files. You have to compile these tar balls and install them on your Linux machine. Few packages can give problems while installing from the tar ball, so you have to install them using a software called yum. Yum checks for the dependencies, and it automatically downloads and installs those dependent packages on your machine. To use yum, open a terminal window and then open /etc/yum.conf using any editor. Now comment out all the entries here, and add fresh entry as.

Name=Deg 

Baseurl=http://atp.sw.be/fedora/1/en/i386/dag

Save this file and use yum to install the dependency packages in the following way.

#yum update 

#yum install transcode

#yum install xvid

#yum install dvix4linux

#yum install libdvdread

#yum install libdvdcss

#yum install lame

The first command will take some time to execute, as it creates a local header repository on your Linux machine. 

Using DVD::Rip

To use this tool, cd into the 'dvdrip' directory and issue this command. 

# ./dvdrip 

You will get a GUI front end of DVD::Rip. Select File>New Project from the file menu. Here, give the project name and click on 'RIP Title' tab. Now click on Edit>Edit Preferences, you will get a preferences window. Select the Filesystem tab and set DVD drives to /dev/hdx (here replace x with the letter that identifies your DVD drive) and DVD mount point to /mnt/cdrom. 

Now in the same window come down and click on 'Check all settings' and you will see the check results in the window, given just below the button. If all the results are OK then click on OK to save the settings. Now, again go to 'RIP Title' tab and click on 'Read DVD Table of Content'. It will get you the DVD movie content in the 'DVD table of Content' window. Here, select the titles that you want to encode and click on 'Rip' button given below this selection window.

After this click on the 'Clip & Zoom'. Here you can crop the video size according to your ease. Now, click on the Transform tab and set video codec to the compression format you want (DivX4 or Xvid4). We used xvid4. Keep the other setting as default, but of course you can change the setting, the way you want if you know of DivX encoding. Now, click on Transcode button to create a single DivX movie file. If you want to split a large movie file into pieces, to fit it into multiple CDs, then click on 'Transcode+split' button. 

Here, select the video compression format you want to encode

Choose the Transcode button that suits you and sit back, as the selected title gets encoded. You will get the DivX file (with a .avi extension) once the encoding is done. This file will be placed in the /CHANGE_ ME/ /avi/001/ directory. You can use gmplayer to play it. DVD::Rip also gives you many options to burn the encoded DivX file on a CD directly.

If you want to burn this DivX file on a CD, the same tool can do it for you. Insert a blank CD in to the DVD/CD writer and select the Burn tab in the file selection window, select the DivX files that you want to burn. In the same window from the 'Operate' section, select 'Burn Selected file(s)' button. 

It will burn the DivX files on the CD. If you want to create an ISO image of the DivX files, so that you can burn the CD afterwards using any CD writing software, then click on 'Create CD image from the selected files' button. It will create ISO image file in the same directory, where it created the DivX files. 

Sanjay Majumder