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Fastest Way to Rip a DVD

Wicked1

Wicked1

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Apr 13, 2009
3,283
14
New Jersey
I am using Mac the Ripper to get it to my HDD then Handbrake but each DVD takes forever, I tried a test with a Movie called Out Cold around 90 minutes running time and it took 4 hours.:eek:

Is there a better way to get my DVD's on my MacBook so I can watch them with iTunes or Q-Time, if not I may rethink using my MacBook to watch movies using the DVD player :eek:
 
Funny you ask - I just finished ripping a 89 minutes DVD with Fairmount and Handbrake on my early 2008 MBP - took around two and half hours at an average of 26 FPS or so with the normal preset (h264/m4v).

I don't think I ever used anything else so I cannot comment on what is the fastest however I do think it depends more on the Machine than the software - so you are not going to get a whole lot faster on that MacBook even if you used any other software unless you change the presets to do something lesser.

May be give the Fairmout and Handbrake combo a try - Fairmount transparently decrypts the DVD so at least you will save the copying to disk time I suppose.
 
Ripping shouldn't take long at all, around twenty minutes to an hour using MacTheRipper or RipIt. The time consuming part is reencoding for whatever device you want to play the movie on. To sacrifice quality in exchange for a much faster encoding time, use a format without H.264 video.
 
You might look into buying an external drive and use it for ripping. I'd suggest one from OWC. Apple drives are riplocked and slow as hell.

When I purchased my first mac (the iMac in my sig), I posted the same question on the Mac the Ripper forums and the response I got from several members was that they used an external (usually firewire) drive for their iMacs and macbooks. Some just bought an external enclosure and threw in an old drive they had laying around; others purchased the whole setup from an online vendor.

I installed an OWC drive in my mac pro and a typical dvd rip went from ~45 minutes to 9 minutes. I later added a Blu-Ray drive and they (Blu-Rays) take about an hour to rip when booted into Windows; about 2 hours when ripping in Windows via Fusion. YMMV.

Hope this helps.

James
 
Give Dragon Burn a try takes a matter of minutes I use it with Mac the Ripper all the time
 
Change your settings if possible. You can tweak stuff in HandBrake to lower quality but also lower size and rip time. You are also running on a fairly slow computer compared to most of the Mac lineup. My computer is only slightly faster than yours, and it seems sluggish as I add a little of this or that on my settings. The key attribute is CPU speed/power, which you can't really do much about.
 
parapup said:
May be give the Fairmout and Handbrake combo a try - Fairmount transparently decrypts the DVD so at least you will save the copying to disk time I suppose.
Click to expand...
Running Fairmount + HB is actually typically slower than just running HB (with vlc in your /Apps folder) on the disk. The reason is fairmount actually remounts the dvd via a private web server, which slows down the transfer rate some. Fairmount *only* provides libdvdcss via VLC's libdvdcss dylib, which incidentally is exactly the same way HB uses VLC's libdvdcss.dylib .

The advantage to using Fairmount is in copying sources to your hard drive to queue up several encodes with HB.

For faster HB encodes you have to turn down some of the settings. Speed, Size, Quality ... pick 2.
 
Handbrake may not be a good option since it can't seem to get past the copy protection of my DVD. Handbrake = F A I L
 
There's nothing that can substitute processor power when it comes to this. I was using a Quad Core 2.4Ghz PC to do this with AnyDVD and handbrake. The process was taking like 45 minutes to do a typical movie. I encoded my son's entire DVD library so he can just have it on his apple TV, no more scratched DVD's and no more asking for another DVD to change the movie. In the end I ended up buying a Dual Quad Dell Workstation off their outlet store for around $1,300.00 and now I use that along with AnyDVD to do all my rip/encodes, takes about 22 minutes per typical 2 hour movie. Cartoon seasons that are interlaced take around 35 minutes with slowest de-interlace setting.

For the heck of it I tried using my mac Mini that has been upgraded to a T7600 cpu, and it took about 2 hours for a 2 hour movie (around 24 fps encoding).

So if you are going to be doing a lot of encoding I strongly suggest getting some kind of Quad core pc or you can wait until the quadcore iMacs come out. You can buy a Dell Core i7 920 based pc with GB of ram for around $580 or so if you look out for buying opportunities with coupons in the outlet store. Makes a great encoding machine.
 
I have posted this in other threads... but using handbrake takes me about 15minutes total for ripping and tagging. Have you tried coping the files to the harddrive first and then ripping them?
 
rhett7660 said:
I have posted this in other threads... but using handbrake takes me about 15minutes total for ripping and tagging. Have you tried coping the files to the harddrive first and then ripping them?
Click to expand...

Hmmm...I may try copying the files to hard drive first. Every DVD that I've tried to re-encode for AppleTV regardless of software always takes about 5 hours to do. This is on a brand new Dell computer with 2 GB of RAM. I suppose a quad core processor and more RAM would help some as well as doing it off the hard drive. I really question as to just how much time I could really save though.
 
I rip dvds using Cucusoft. 720x480 @ 1500kbps and it averages 75-80fps on my 2.4 MBP and plays on everything from Ipod to PS3.
 
I don't think I've ever been able to get anything in 15 minutes from dvd on-hand to tagged m4v file.

I'm using my Dell T7400 workstation which has 8 cores running at 2.66 ghz and 4GB of ram. I ripped directly off the DVD and depending on movie content, I average about 125 fps, thus a 120 minute movie would run around 24 minutes, then the tagging takes another 3 to 5 minutes depending on how detailed I want the information on the tags as this is mostly a manual thing. I enconded a 110 minute movie yesterday on a 2.4Ghz C2D machine and it averaged around 25 fps, so the entire encoding process took about 105 minutes. I use a custom setting that works well enough for ipods and my Apple TV. I use constant quality at 59% H.264 a Width fixed at 640 (yes I do lower the resolution of a standard DVD), but I have found the 640 resolution to be very acceptable for AppleTV viewing in a 52inch rear projection screen.
 
encoding speed is all about the encode settings given the same hardware. No more and no less.

Speed, Size, Quality ... pick 2.

Another note about speed on very fast systems (like an octo-core nehalem) . If encoding right from the dvd its very possible to hit a bottleneck at the dvd drive, in other words the encoder is encoding faster than the drive can feed it info, in which case reading right from a pre-ripped copy on the hard drive would speed up encoding even faster.

Also note that in HB the filters (like detelecine, deinterlace) are not as well threaded as the x264 encoder and can drop your cpu utilization some therefore slowing down the encode vs. no filters.
 
So I am really confused.... I am in the process of backing up my Seinfeld Complete collection. I am using two computers, a 2.93 Macbook Pro with and a 2.0 Mac Mini w/mini display port. Both computers have 7200rpm drives, 4gb of ram, and the exact same settings for handbrake. The mac mini is out performing the macbook pro, ripping the dvd at 90fps vs 40fps on the pro. Any ideas? I am on higher performance settings for the laptop too.
 
Would the El Gato $149 (or $99 refub) encoding accelerator dongle thing speed up Handbrake encodes. From their ads it sounds like it would and at a very cost effective price, too.
 
Moof1904 said:
Would the El Gato $149 (or $99 refub) encoding accelerator dongle thing speed up Handbrake encodes. From their ads it sounds like it would and at a very cost effective price, too.
Click to expand...

Not with HandBrake. The dongle works with their own software, or with Toast (which licensed the technology from El Gato.)

I've used their older dongle (not the newer HD version) and found it worked fine on my older Core Duo Macbook. Made the H.264 encoding considerably faster. The quality of the video was OK, maybe not as sharp as Handbrake, but good enough for my purposes.

I wouldn't use the older dongle on newer Core 2 Duo hardware because you won't see that much of a difference. Their newer HD version supposedly provides more speed improvement, but I don't know about the quality of the video produced.

But if you want to use either dongle with Handbrake - forget it.
 
HandBrake

You can use HandBrake to rip a DVD for just its video and audio in 45 minutes, also it bypasses the security on the disc. You don't need to use MacTheRipper then use handbrake seeing as HandBrake can rip straight from the DVD. MacTheRipper is good for if you need/want to make a copy of a DVD and retain the disc's menus and structure.
 
ez4u2sa67 said:
You can use HandBrake to rip a DVD for just its video and audio in 45 minutes
Click to expand...

That depends on many things. For example, on my quad-core hackintosh with its 16x DVD read abilities, I can rip a dual-layer DVD in about 15 or 20 min.

MacTheRipper is good for if you need/want to make a copy of a DVD and retain the disc's menus and structure.
Click to expand...

Or more often, if you want to queue up Handbrake with many movies.
 
Speed isn't a priority for me. I don't mind doing a few per day, little by little. Is there any danger, however, in doing this? I imagine that the computer has to work pretty hard depending on what the set up is. Is it okay to rip a dvd 24/7? Or should I give it a break and turn it off everyday?
 
parapup said:
Funny you ask - I just finished ripping a 89 minutes DVD with Fairmount and Handbrake on my early 2008 MBP - took around two and half hours at an average of 26 FPS or so with the normal preset (h264/m4v).

I don't think I ever used anything else so I cannot comment on what is the fastest however I do think it depends more on the Machine than the software - so you are not going to get a whole lot faster on that MacBook even if you used any other software unless you change the presets to do something lesser.

May be give the Fairmout and Handbrake combo a try - Fairmount transparently decrypts the DVD so at least you will save the copying to disk time I suppose.
Click to expand...

Do you save your ripped content on the external HD?. If so your external hd may be the bottleneck. I use ripit too and it went very fast
 
I've been using the free MakeMKV beta to create archive copies of my DVDs. The transfer to my external HD takes between 20 and 30 minutes depending upon the length of the movie. You end up with files that are the same size as the original DVD since there is no re-encoding (generally between 4GB and 6GB), but of course the quality is identical to the original. You can play MKV files on a Mac or PC using the free VLC media player.

After I save the archive MKV I sometimes re-encode using Handbrake to create files for my Apple TV. I also create reduced-resolution, low-bitrate encodes for my PogoPlug so that I can view my content over the internet/3G with my iPhone.
 
fpnc said:
I've been using the free MakeMKV beta to create archive copies of my DVDs. The transfer to my external HD takes between 20 and 30 minutes depending upon the length of the movie. You end up with files that are the same size as the original DVD since there is no re-encoding (generally between 4GB and 6GB), but of course the quality is identical to the original. You can play MKV files on a Mac or PC using the free VLC media player.

After I save the archive MKV I sometimes re-encode using Handbrake to create files for my Apple TV. I also create reduced-resolution, low-bitrate encodes for my PogoPlug so that I can view my content over the internet/3G with my iPhone.
Click to expand...

I agree MakeMKV is the fastest way to rip a DVD or BD. I have an external Samsung SE-506CB and rip discs at about 10MB/s. Handbrake crunches the rip down at between 400 and 700 fps on my new iMac 3.1GHz i5 under OSX 10.11.1.

Discovered a little trick with increasing the the rip speed. Once MakeMKV starts ripping, select About This Mac from your Apple menu and then select the Storage tab, the SE-506CB spins up and rips faster.
 
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