For a couple of years there have been a number of great open-source programs around for encoding video, both in Windows and (Ubuntu) Linux. Some of them provide a nice graphical user interface, but the best ones are still commandline tools, such as ffmpeg and MEncoder. They are extremely flexible, but unfortunately also have a bewildering number of commandline options. This page lists a few invocations I regularly use.

Extracting DVD titles

To extract a single title from a DVD, first copy the DVD to harddisk:

dvdbackup -M

Next, use totem or vlc (under Plackback->Title) to find out the number of the title you want. For our example we’ll assume that the DVD files are in a directory called DVD_VOLUME/ and that we want the second title. Finally, copy the title …

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