ripping from DVD?

[rdrummer322]

Any decent (preferrably free) software available to rip a couple of minutes from a DVD to post on Facebook, etc? No copyright issues with this particular rip.

[blue2blue]

It depends on whether the DVD itself was copy protected.

 

I have a bunch of DVDs I burned on my set-top burner and the VOB files can be processed by a number of video editing/conversion tools. Some tools, AIUI, will ignore copy protection. My editor, Vegas, which can, indeed, open VOBs -- although it often seems like it really doesn't want to -- when you try to select the VOB file in the File Manger file open dialog in Windows, it seems to hang up -- but if I give it a couple minutes [the rest of my XP system is fine] it eventually seems to open up like any other supported video file -- although the VOB format is not on the list of supported formats.

 

In fact, when you go to look for files to open, you have to put a *.* mask in to get it to show 'unsupported' files. But since a VOB is essentially an MPEG file, I guess that's why it works. FWIW, I had crap luck doing imports. It seemed to bollix up the transistions at the breaks between VOB files. I was able to manually adjust the transitions much better.

 

OTOH, Vegas stops cold at copy protection, far as I know. (Although I think I just tried it once to see what would happen, since I really didn't have any interest in making a copy of commercial DVDs. Not unexpectedly, since its daddy, Sony, owns one of the largest collections of movie licenses.)