I've used one or two of these in the past and they couldn't even rip some DVD movies as well as Handbrake could. Have these gotten better recently to be able to rip more of some of these newer movies that try to trick such programs? "Pursuit of Happyness" is one that comes to mind that just doesn't like to be backed up on anything it seemed at the time

I just use ripit4me and dvd decrypter under wine to rip the dvd to an iso file which vlc places. Works without a fuss.

Working with my HTPC I've had to encode quite a few movies. I started with DVD:Rip but found that it messed up the audio on a few movies. AcidRip seemed to work much more consistently, but I still had to revert to command line encodings for certain...."difficult" DVDs. Finally, Handbrake is available for Linux, and the inherent multi-threading makes it a breeze (and very fast). Encoding a full movie in less than 30 minutes on a quad-core AMD Phenom XII.

The nice presets with Handbrake for encoding to ipod, saves me having to remember all of the containers and codecs and resolution settings I need.

Yes! I use libdvdcss2 too. What about you talk more about this in a large range of Linux distributions? For gathering more reliable data to Linux.COM, it will be better have more information about "similarities" in many Linux distributions, and than, make some comparison tables about.

What do you think about this idea? And of course, we can gather all information posted in comments too. All users can contribute to generate more and more knowledge. :-)

If you need help to gather all this information, you can count on me to do that. And than, try to publish in a tutorial's like section.

Thanks a lot! :-D

People who want to rip DVDs on Linux should first try out Handbrake, it is easily the best that I have used (and I've used pretty much all of them). If you're on Ubuntu, here's a short tutorial I wrote to get you up and running with Handbrake: http://spareclockcycles.wordpr...on-ubuntu/

Handbrake is a DVD to MPEG4 converter and to my knowledge is incapable of making a DVD backup. A backup is a copy of the original so that it will be preserved in case of failure of the original. By definition, this means that Handbrake (or any application that rips and re-encodes) does not make backups. A backup means a 1:1 copy (or at least in the case of DVD's shrinking 9>5), not a re-encoded version in another container because the re-encoded version is incapable of being used to restore your original.

In my experience nothing works better for ripping than DVD Fab & nothing works better for shrinking than DVD Shrink, ,both free to use and both work splendidly in WINE and there is not 1 single DVD that I can find that you cannot rip in this way. The last time I tried any of the apps mentioned by the author they all failed to rip the encrypted DVD's, especially the nasty Sony ARccOS DVD's. It would also be interesting to see if K9 can rip anything (relatively recent) from Disney - I'd be surprised if it could.

script written for mplayer+x264 is making perferct rips for me, i just need to adjust SAR, crop, fps and filters i want to use

In response to #7, it is untrue that re-encoded content cannot be restored to a DVD. As luck would have it, I have also written up a howto on how to restore DVDs backed up with Handbrake with DeVeDe, a DVD creation tool available on Linux: http://spareclockcycles.wordpr...th-devede/ .

Regardless, you could still view the video file on your computer (which is where I watch most of my movies anyway), so you'd still have access to the content if your disk got scratched up. Re-encoding, imo, is superior to a straight backup (or a 9->5 backup) because you get almost no quality loss (especially if you use x264, it will easily be better than the quality of a 9->5 backup for the space) and you get much better compression levels, meaning less space is used per rip. The point is arguable, as you lose most of the extra stuff on the DVD, but I don't care much about that, and you could back it up as well if you really wanted to.