Digital Home Thoughts: Ripping Your DVDs the Quick, Easy and Free Way

AutoGK
Next, open AutoGK. As I said, AutoGK is actually an amalgam of various video processing programs, all presented in a simple interface for ease of use. As you look at the main AutoGK window, you can see that each step is in fact numbered for you. I'll take you through each step.



The first step is to tell AutoGK what you're going to process by specifying the Input file. Click on the folder-with-arrow icon to the right of that field and browse to the folder where you ripped the DVD files. Open the .IFO file, not the .VOB files. If you've ripped an episodic DVD, AutoGK may ask you to select which episode on the disc it is, based on the information found in the .IFO file. Select the disc episode number if necessary (aren't you glad you named the folders with the disc episode number?). Next, click the folder-with-arrow icon to the right of the Output file field. You'll notice that it has already filled in the filename field with the same name as the folder the files are in. Nice touch. Click Save to exit back to the main window.





Step two is for the audio parameters. For most English movies, you'll leave these set to the defaults. However, if you're ripping a foreign film, you can select the native language track and the desired subtitles in the Audio track(s): and Subtitle track(s): fields. There are also certain circumstances where you would want to select the English subtitle track even if the audio track is in English. Any movie that has built-in English subtitling will often rely on the DVD's subtitle track. The movie Syriana, for example, is primarily in English but has a major amount of Arabic being spoken. The DVD uses the English subtitle track to display them when you're watching it on a regular player. In these cases, you'll want to select the English subtitle track as well as the 'Display only forced subtitles' option in the Advanced Settings dialog (I'll get to that in a second).



Next, select the output size. You can specify a Predefined size, Custom size (target size in MB) or Target quality (in percentage). I usually use Target quality and let AutoGK calculate the necessary bitrates etc. needed to achieve it. For most stuff I rip, I usually waver between 80 and 95% quality. For 'archival-quality', ramp the desired quality up to 100%. For our test here, I'll choose 80%.



Step four are the (optional) advanced parameters (though they don't seem so optional to me). Click on the Advanced Settings button and the Advanced Options dialog will pop up.



In the Output resolution settings you can specify what the width of the final file will be. For movies, I specify a Fixed width of 720. If I'm ripping a TV show where the resolution's not crucial, I'll often specify a width of 512. Optionally, you can choose 320 to format it for a Pocket PC screen (though I usually prefer to convert the ripped file afterwards). In the Output audio type section, I usually select VBR MP3 at 192kbps for movies and 128 for television shows. Next select whether you want to encode to the DivX or XviD codec (again, you'll need DivX 5.2 installed to encode to that codec). Finally, if the video you're encoding has a lot of subtitled languages but otherwise has an English soundtrack, checking the 'Display only forced subtitles' box, along with the English subtitle track on the main screen, forces AutoGK to only display the subtitles that the DVD track calls for (forces). With all the Advanced options set, click OK to exit back to the main window.



In the main AutoGK window, click the Add job button to add your rip job to the queue. You can queue up as many DVDs to process as you want with this process. When you're happy with your settings, click the Start button to begin processing. First it will analyze the entire film, then decode, normalize and encode the audio (using the LAME engine). After it's done with the audio, it will begin the video encoding process. The speed of the encoding will depend on the speed of your processor. It took an hour and fifteen minutes on my (admittedly aged) machine to process the entire set of files, which gives me a total approximate rip time of 2:15 (for a 2.5-hour movie). When it's done, the Job finished message will appear in the Low window area, at which point you can close AutoGK.