Filed under: Video, How-tos, Surveys and Polls
How do you rip a clip from a DVD on OS X?
Anders Pollas wants to know about OS X DVD-ripping software. There are several tools out there that will rip an entire DVD to your hard drive, either compressed or uncompressed, but none of these tools make grabbing a specific clip from a film easy, which is what Anders needs. He says, "Im looking for some way of grabbing a specific 3-minute part of a DVD, drag it into iMovie (or something along those lines) for trimming the bits, do a decent fade or whatever."I covered How to copy your DVDs / CDs in three parts (one, two, and three) a while back. However, since the interest is in grabbing only a specific part of a film, I'd use DVDBackup. This program will make an uncompressed copy of your DVD on your hard drive in a VIDEO_TS folder. After all the different .VOB files have been pulled onto your computer, you just need to figure out which one of those files contains the clip you want to view. If Quicktime is giving you any trouble opening the .VOB files, try using VLC. Open each file up in sequence and see if it is near where your clip appears in the DVD. Once you think you have the right .VOB file, you'll need to convert it into a file format that will let you edit it and this will be the time consuming part of the process.
Quicktime tends to choke on these files and lose the audio when it converts them, so you'll need to grab something like HandBrake, DVDibbler, or ffmpegX to compress and convert the file. Of course, all of these programs could rip and compress the entire DVD, but compressing and re-encoding an entire DVD is much more time consuming (4-10 hours depending upon your processor) than compressing and re-encoding the individual .VOB file (thus the DVDBackup step above). Then, you'll most likely need Quicktime Pro to edit it nicely and cut out the little 3-minute clip. This method is lots and lots of work and very time consuming.
Does anyone know of a simpler and quicker solution? Let us know in the comments.
Update: Make sure you check the comments on this one. Lots of great tips. Our readers rock!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Brad said 12:13AM on 12-08-2005
Great suggestions in this post for extracting clips, but what I'm looking for is a simple way to extract just the movie portion (no special features or the extras which bulk up the file siz) so that I can burn it to a DVD. I found how to save the stream of just that portion using YadeX, but have no idea how to then burn it to a DVD. Typically, if the DVD is under 4.7 GB, I just save the disc image and burn it easily using the disc utility. All advice and suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
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Derek Jones said 2:14PM on 7-22-2005
YadeX. You can go down to the clip level and extract as a stream, and end up with the mpeg2 and AAC audio files just for that short clip. It includes a preview window so you can browse through the dozens of clips that make up the film, and make sure you are extracting only the part you want.
http://www.macetvideo.com/dl_center/dl_center.html
Download the US or French version, whatever you speaketh.
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Jakob said 2:16PM on 7-22-2005
Handbrake (which is an all-around drop-dead awesome bit of code) doesn't handle single .VOB files. However, as of 0.7, it encode any range of chapters. This should cut the encoding time quite a bit.
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superdan311 said 2:36PM on 7-22-2005
Way to complex! First off all I gotta say is CINEMATIZE!!! Rip the Chapter with "Mactheripper" then throw that into Cinematize set it for the type you want it transcoded to... I would recommend straight DV (Same format iMovie works with as it is what Mini DV cams record in)... then you can do what you please with it!
Trust me you will save a lot of time and it works!
Steps:
1.) Rip DVD or Chapter Need with Mactheripper (Find on versiontracker.com)
2.) Take the ripped footage and throw it into Cinematize (Also look on versiontracker.com for it)
3.) Let Er' Rip! and in sometime you will be left with Raw DV footage which you can effortlessly edit etc.. in iMovie!
Good Luck Homie!
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Derek Jones said 2:17PM on 7-22-2005
I should add that you'll of course still need to use something to convert it to DV if you're going to edit with it. ffmpegX is my favorite for going from mpeg2 to DV. You'll add the AC3 (I said AAC before, whoops, BIG difference) file in the Audio tab so your DV file will be complete and ready to drop into iMovie or FCE/P.
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Chris Chen said 2:27PM on 7-22-2005
Anyone know of a free Mac OSX app that can convert a single VOB file to any of the following MPEG-1, MPEG-4, Quicktime, AVI?
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iFelix said 2:32PM on 7-22-2005
How about using SnapzProX?
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/
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superdan311 said 2:36PM on 7-22-2005
Mactheripper = FREE
Cinematize = Demo (or get creative... "surfer")
iMovie = You Got it!
Priceless!!!
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systemsboy said 2:41PM on 7-22-2005
There's a great free application called MPEG Streamclip that will encode straight from a DVD .vob file to DV-NTSC, or just about anything else you can think of. It's awesome and, did I mention, free.
http://www.alfanet.it/squared5/mpegstreamclip.html
systemsboy
http://systemsboy.blogspot.com/
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Chris Rios said 4:50PM on 7-22-2005
I use MacTheRipper to get the VOB off of the DVD and then I use MPEG Streamclip. There is one catch. You need to have the Quicktime MPEG-2 encoder to use MPEG Streamclip for the VOB file. The encoder is $20 from apple. Everything has been flawless for me. Never had a problem, and when you bring the VOB into MPEG Streamclip you can edit it down to whatever you need and then convert it to whatever format you want. Works like a charm (at least for me it has).
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Derek Jones said 2:57PM on 7-22-2005
Everyone is suggesting nice software, but Yade X is the only one that addresses the specific need of this person posing the question. He's not wanting the whole DVD, he's not even wanting entire chapters, which can still be unweildy. He just wants clips.
YadeX is the *only* free solution that will let you dive into not only the individual chapters, not only the individual Cells, but the very small Objects that actually make up the VOB stream. Chapters are at minimum MINUTES of video. Cells are SECONDS of video, usually less than 10, and Objects are the individual portions of the mpeg2 stream at each GOP point, so there may be as many as 1000 Objects for 10 seconds of video.
I doubt he needs THAT low of a level, but the Cell level he definitely needs, and working with 5-20 seconds of video at a time is exponentially less weildy than any of the proposed solutions working with chunks as large as chapters.
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Jerid Hill said 3:20PM on 7-22-2005
If you want 3 minutes worth, It would take about 6 minutes to get it on your computer.
Here is a program for the Mac:
http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Utilities/Screen-Movie-Recorder.shtml
I take a Tape Recorder, output my audio jack to the tape player, push play on the DVD and record on the tape player and record on the screen movie recorder. When you are finished, you have a quicktime movie. Then record the audio from the tape player to the computer. Merge the two in iMovie then iDVD.
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Chris said 3:22PM on 7-22-2005
Thanks systemsboy, MPEG Streamclip works great for converting single VOB files.
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Chris said 3:39PM on 7-22-2005
I've had to get clips from DVD's also. My method was probably the ghetto way but it works great depending on your equipment. I have acess to a iMac G5 that I pop the movie into and then set up my Panasonic DVX-100 MiniDV camera to record the movie full screen. I run the audio out from the iMac into the camera's audio input via a minijack to XLR cable. Make sure I've got the camera set up right and the audio I found I had to pan all the way left on the iMac. This works great.
5 minutes setup time
3 minutes of recording (for your three minute clip)
3 minutes of importing from Camera to iMovie
So around 12 minutes and it's done. Depending on your camera you'll excellent quality.
Note: If the movie is in widescreen mode then very litte pan and scan will be necessary.
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AHM said 3:32PM on 7-22-2005
If you happen to have a PC sitting around, DVDShrink will allow you to cut individual clips out of a movie with nice slider controls and previews. It's truly impressive. Nothing quite like it on the Mac, sadly, although Yadex comes the closest.
After you have the VOB extracted, use ffmpegx to convert it to whatever format you like. You may need to "demux" the VOB - split it into audio and video - before converting it. ffmpegx can do that if you forgot to do it in yadex. If you're working with iMovie, DV is a nice format to convert it to.
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iFelix said 3:46PM on 7-24-2005
Another solution.
If you have an eyeTV device (with the right input) connected to a DVD player then you can record the clip and use the editing tools in eyeTV to get the right clip and export into a suitable format for whatever use you need.
I do appreciate that the solutions I am providing are not open source, but the question was what are quick and simple solutions.
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Clay said 5:56PM on 7-22-2005
I second the MPEG Streamclip nomination. It's great for selecting in and out points and converting to quicktime (H264 crashes the current version). It doesn't require converting entire chapters - and it's free. You may need to get the QT MPEG2 decoder from Apple though.
Mac the Ripper to rip the DVD to disc.
MPEG Streamclip to grab selections.
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Tony Barnhill said 4:13PM on 7-22-2005
On a side note, what is the easiest way to rip the main part of a dvd to divx/xvid/h264 on Tiger? I can do this pretty easily on PC, but I would like to use my mac to do it. I have almost 400 dvd's that I'm going to rip to a media server I have in my house. Every TV in the house has a modified xbox that can pull these files across the network. That way, I can access every movie from every TV.
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morgan m said 4:32PM on 7-22-2005
i just drag all the contents of the dvd to my external harddrive, and open the ts.folder in dvd player. works flawlessly everytime.
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Navypoo said 11:51PM on 7-22-2005
I really liked Cinematize. It's fast, has a great UI, and rips to any Quicktime codec.
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