Ripping Woes: UK, Australian...

[MJLogan]

I'm having a great deal of trouble ripping a few of my favorite DVDs. They're all UK or Australian disks. I'm in the US, working on US-model computers.

David Attenborough's "Life on Earth"--a UK region 2 set, and Melvyn Bragg's "Adventure of English"--an Australian region 4 set are giving me trouble today. I gave up on "Marvel Superheroes 1968 Collection" (a Jetix disk from UK) last week.

I have MTR 3.something and the current Handbrake, which work on all my other disks. I got a trial version of DVDFab running in Bootcamp. That failed. I tried RipIt and Fairmount as well.

I can work in Mac OS X or in Vista, and I'm willing to buy a commercial product if it will actually work.

I have a top-of-the-line Mac Mini with maxed-out RAM and a mid-line unibody MBP, also with maxed-out RAM.

 

[MJLogan]

I've come up with a very time-intensive workaround. After much fussing with settings, I'm finally getting great-looking files out of my Hauppauge HD-PVR connected to an old region-free progressive-scan DVD player. It works in real time, so it will take 8 hours to get through just the 8-part "Adventure of English" series--but then I'm doing this because I like to watch these again occasionally...

Still, it makes me mad that they won't rip.

 

[GreatDrok]

I moved to NZ from the UK a couple of years back and most of my DVD collection is region 1 or 2. I've now got a few region 4 discs too. My Mac mini and MacBook Pro are both British so have their superdrive set to region 2, the iBook is set to region 4 and is a combo drive. I can only rip region 2 discs on the superdrives, but I can rip any region on the combo drive but the machine is a G4 so it is too slow. I have a USB DVD drive which I can attach to any of my machines and rip happily from. It seems full size drives don't tend to enforce the region coding as strongly as the superdrives do and so VLC is able to play any region DVD.

However, my current solution is to use the Linux command line version of HandBrake on a cheap AMD Sempron box I bought which has a standard DVD drive which although not region free, doesn't impose the region on the ripping software like the Mac superdrives do. Also, the single Sempron at 2Ghz is faster than my Core Duo MacBook Pro and way faster than either G4. I do the rips to MP4 rather than H.264, 2.5Mbps two pass and with AAC and AC3 soundtracks with 640 pixels width for the picture. This results in files that play well on my Apple TV and my iPod 5.5G.