MASSIVE DIGITAL MEDIA HOW-TO MASSIVE DIGITAL MEDIA HOW-TO MASSIVE DIGITAL MEDIA HOW-TO MASSIVE DIGITAL MEDIA HOW-TO MASSIVE DIGITAL MEDIA HOW-TO
MA XIMUMPC MARCH 200 5
HAVE A RIPPING TIME
WITH YOUR DVDS!
Your laptop lacks an integrated optical
drive, so you’d like to rip your DVDs
onto its hard drive. You’re bored in the
jury box, so you’d like to watch a movie
on your PDA or handheld video player.
Your kids are too lazy to put DVDs back
into their protective cases, so you’d
rather they destroy backups of the
discs instead of the originals. Each of
these scenarios is an example of hfair
usev as defined by U.S. copyright law.
The Digital Millennium Copyright
Act of 199 (DMCA) didn’t revoke
the concept of fair-use rights but
by summarily prohibiting the
circumvention of copy protection, it
made these rights nearly impossible to
exercise. As a result, each of the fun-
making activities described above is
virtually impossible to do legally. And
we think that’s just ridiculous.
We’re not out to vilify the
entertainment industry, which
encompasses thousands of record
labels, movie studios, game
publishers, and the artists who create
the products the industry sells. They
all have a serious and legitimate beef
with intellectual-property pirates. As
a magazine publisher, we’re equally
interested in protecting our own
intellectual property rights. The fact
is, music, movies, and games appear
on the Internet with appalling speed
afterand sometimes even before
their commercial release. And don’t
kid yourself that casual piracysuch
as downloading a movie or a game
without paying for it, and then
justifying the act with the contention
that you wouldn’t have paid for it
anywaydoesn’t hurt anyone.
Pirates should also drop their
whining claims that the entertainment
industry makes more money than it’s
entitled to. Companies invest huge
amounts of money in every title they
release, and the rise of peer-to-peer
piracy only discourages them from
taking risks. Why should a publisher
develop an innovative new game
or movie that might lose money at
retail, only to watch it become the
latest, hottest download on BitTorrent?
Wouldn’t it be safer for them to push
out Doom 11, The Sims: Living Deadexpansion pack, or Spider-Man 8,
properties that are reasonably sure to
turn a profit?
The entertainment industry will sort
out its issues with technology some
day until then, we’ll need to perform
work-arounds and use software that
can be used for purposes both legal
and illegal in order to exercise our fair-
use rights.Rip it to Divx
Let’s start with commercial DVDs.
In a perfect world, you could simply
drag the contents of your DVD’s
VIDEO?TS folder onto your laptop’s
hard drive and play the movie with
a software DVD player. The content
scrambling system (CSS) used on most
commercial DVDs, however, prevents
you from doing that. But the cat got out
of the bag in 1999, when an industrious
lad named *on *ohansen cracked CSS
so he could watch movies on his Linux
PC. Once *ohansen’s simple code was
distributed, there was no wayshort
of altering the DVD spec and rendering
every DVD player obsoleteto shove
the cat back into the bag.
Software that breaks CSS
encryption is illegal under the DMCA,
so you won’t find it at Best Buy. But
that hasn’t stopped it from being
sold by companies located in certain
tropical countries lacking extradition
treaties. Take Slysoft’s AnyDVD ($40,
ww w.slysoft.com), for instance. Thisprogram will decrypt a DVD on the my
just as if the CSS encryption wasn’t
there at all. DVD-video files can
consume up to .5GB of your hard
drive, however, and storage space
on laptops and portable devices is
notoriously scarce. Wouldn’t it be so
much better if an application not only
ripped the contents of your DVD, but
also compressed it into a single file
for playback? That’s just what #1 DVD
Ripper does ($35, http://www.dvdtox.com), and
we’ll show you how easily it’s done.
If you choose to buy this software,
however, be aware that using it not
only violates U.S. law, but because it’s
sold by an hoffshorev company, you’re
pretty much SOL if you buy the product
and then decide you don’t like it.#1 DVD Ripper at Work
Before you begin, you’ll need to
download the codec (compressor
decompressor) you wish to use to
compress your video. In this example,
we’ll use version 4.1.2 of the popular
and freeDivx codec. We use an older
version of the codec because that’s
what the developer of #1 DVD Ripper
recommends. Run the installation
routines for both Divx and #1 DVD
Ripper and you’ll be ready to go.
Once you’ve launched #1 DVD
Ripper, click the discarrow icon in the
far left side of the application to peek
into the DVD’s contents. DVDs often
contain tons of material you might notSelecting the proper chapter and title is easy, if you know what
you’re looking for. The first thing to do is check the boxes for the
chapters you wish to rip.Ë