Top 5 Linux DVD RIP Software

by VIVEK GITE on FEBRUARY 7, 2011 · 19 COMMENTS

ADVD ripper software allows you to copying the content of a DVD to a hard disk drive. You transfer video on DVDs to different formats, or make a backup of DVD content, and to convert DVD video for playback on media players, streaming, and mobile phone. A few DVD rippers software can copy protected disks so that you can make discs unrestricted and region-free.

Please note that most of the following programs can rip encrypted DVDs, as long as you have libdvdcss2 installed as described here. Please check the copyright laws for your country regarding the backup of any copyright-protected DVDs and other media.

#1: AcidRIP

AcidRip is an automated front end for MPlayer/Mencoder (ripping and encoding DVD tool using mplayer and mencoder) written in Perl, using Gtk2::Perl for a graphical interface. Makes encoding a DVD just one button click! You can install it as follows under Debian / Ubuntu Linux:
$ sudo apt-get install acidrip

Fig.01: Linux Ripping And Encoding DVD's With AcidRip Software

On the Preview tab you can choose to watch a bit of a preview of the resulting movie:

Fig.02: Preview your DVD rip

And when you are ready, click the Start button to rip DVDs.

=> Download acidrip

#2: DVD::RIP

dvd::rip is a full featured DVD copy program written in Perl i.e. fron end for transcode and ffmpeg. It provides an easy to use but feature-rich Gtk+ GUI to control almost all aspects of the ripping and transcoding process. It uses the widely known video processing swissknife transcode and many other Open Source tools. dvd::rip itself is licensed under GPL / Perl Artistic License. You can install dvd::rip as follows under Debian / Ubuntu Linux:
$ sudo apt-get install dvdrip

Fig.03: dvd::rip in action

You need to configure dvd::rip before you actually start a project. See the documentation for more information.

=> Download dvd::rip

#3: HandBrake

HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. It can rip from any DVD or Bluray-like source such as VIDEO_TS folder, DVD image, real DVD or bluray (unencrypted -- removal of copy protection is not supported), and some .VOB, .TS and M2TS files. You can install HandBrake under Debian or Ubuntu Linux as follows:
$ sudo apt-get install handbrake-gtk

Fig.04: HandBrake in action

=> Download HandBrake

#4: k9copy

K9copy is a KDE DVD Backup tool. It allows the copy of a DVD9 to a DVD5. It is also known as a Linux DVD shrink. It supports the following features:

The video stream is compressed to make the video fiton a 4.7GB recordable DVD
DVD Burning
Creation of ISO images
Choosing which audio and subtitle tracks are copied.
Title preview (video only)
The ability to preserve the original menus.

To install k9copy, enter:
$ sudo apt-get install k9copy

Fig.05: k9copy - Linux dvd shrink in action

=> Download k9copy

#5: thoggen

thoggen is a DVD backup utility ('DVD ripper') for Linux, based on GStreamer and Gtk+ toolkit. Thoggen is designed to be easy and straight-forward to use. It attempts to hide the complexity many other transcoding tools expose and tries to offer sensible defaults that work okay for most people most of the time. It support the following features:

Easy to use, with a nice graphical user interface (GUI).
Supports title preview, picture cropping, and picture resizing.
Language Selection for audio track (no subtitle support yet though).
Encodes into Ogg/Theora video.
Can encode from local directory with video DVD files.
Based on the GStreamer multimedia framework, which makes it fairly easy to add additional encoding formats/codecs in future.

You can install thoggen as follows:
$ sudo apt-get install thoggen

Fig.06: Thoggen in action

=> Download thoggen

Other Tools and Back-ends

=> You need to install various libraries to use the above mentioned tools such as (yum or apt-get commands will install them automatically for you):

libdvdcss2 - Simple foundation for reading DVDs - runtime libraries.
libdvdnav4 - DVD navigation library.
libdvdread4 - library for reading DVDs.

=> mencoder - Personally, I use mencoder to rip my DVDs into .avi files as follows:

mencoder dvd://2 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:vbitrate="1200" -vf scale -zoom -xy 640 -oac mp3lame -lameopts br=128 -o /nas/videos/my-movies/example/track2.avi

Please note that AcidRip, is a graphical frontend for mencoder.

=> VLC - Yes, VLC can rip DVDs too.

=> Transcode is a suite of command line utilities for transcoding video and audio codecs, and for converting between different container formats. Transcode can decode and encode many audio and video formats. Both K9Copy and dvd::rip are a graphical frontend for transcode.

=> Wine - It is an open source software for running Windows applications on other operating systems. You can use popular MS-Windows application such as DVDFab to rip encrypted DVD's and DVD Shrink to shrink them to smaller size. I do not *recommend* and encourage this option as it goes against the FOSS philosophy. The following screenshot based on trial version of DVDFab: