Top 5 Linux DVD RIP Software

A DVD ripper software allows you to copy the content of a DVD to a hard disk drive. You transfer video on DVDs to different formats. You can make a backup of DVD content. One can convert DVD video for playback on media players, streaming, and mobile phone. A few DVD rippers software can copy protected disks so that you can make discs unrestricted and region-free.



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A note about dealing with encrypted DVDs

The process of ripping a DVD broken down into two tasks:

Data extraction – Copying DVD data to a hard disk Transcoding – Converting the extracted data into a suitable format such as mp4

If you wish to play or rip encrypted DVDs, you must install the libdvd* packages on your Linux distro. Most of the following programs can rip encrypted DVDs, as long as you have libdvdcss2 installed as described here. Please check the copyright laws for your country regarding the backup of any copyright-protected DVDs and other media.

1. AcidRIP – Ripping and encoding DVD tool using mplayer and mencoder

AcidRip is an automated front end for MPlayer/Mencoder (ripping and encoding DVD tool using mplayer and mencoder) written in Perl, using Gtk2::Perl for a graphical interface. Makes encoding a DVD just one button click! You can install it as follows under Debian / Ubuntu Linux:

$ sudo apt-get install acidrip



On the Preview tab you can choose to watch a bit of a preview of the resulting movie:And when you are ready, click thebutton to rip DVDs.

=> Download acidrip

2. DVD::RIP – Front end for transcode and ffmpeg

dvd::rip is a full featured DVD copy program written in Perl i.e. fron end for transcode and ffmpeg. It provides an easy to use but feature-rich Gtk+ GUI to control almost all aspects of the ripping and transcoding process. It uses the widely known video processing swissknife transcode and many other Open Source tools. dvd::rip itself is licensed under GPL / Perl Artistic License. You can install dvd::rip as follows under Debian / Ubuntu Linux:

$ sudo apt-get install dvdrip



You need to configure dvd::rip before you actually start a project. See the documentation for more information.

=> Download dvd::rip

3. HandBrake – Versatile DVD ripper and video transcoder for Linux

HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. It can rip from any DVD or Bluray-like source such as VIDEO_TS folder, DVD image, real DVD or bluray (unencrypted — removal of copy protection is not supported), and some .VOB, .TS and M2TS files. You can install HandBrake under Debian or Ubuntu Linux as follows:

$ sudo apt-get install handbrake handbrake-cli



handbrake-cli is DVD ripper and video transcoder for command line users.

=> Download HandBrake

4. dvdbackup – Tool to rip DVD’s from the Linux command line

dvdbackup is a tool to rip video DVDs from the command line. It has the advantages of being small, fast, and easy to use. Install the dvdbackup package using the apt command:

$ sudo apt install dvdbackup



To backup the whole DVD, run:

$ dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -o ~ -M

See dvdbackup man page for more info:

$ man dvdbackup

=> Download dvdbackup

5. thoggen – DVD backup utility (‘DVD ripper’) for Linux

thoggen is a DVD backup utility (‘DVD ripper’) for Linux, based on GStreamer and Gtk+ toolkit. Thoggen is designed to be easy and straight-forward to use. It attempts to hide the complexity many other transcoding tools expose and tries to offer sensible defaults that work okay for most people most of the time. It support the following features:

Easy to use, with a nice graphical user interface (GUI).

Supports title preview, picture cropping, and picture resizing.

Language Selection for audio track (no subtitle support yet though).

Encodes into Ogg/Theora video.

Can encode from local directory with video DVD files.

Based on the GStreamer multimedia framework, which makes it fairly easy to add additional encoding formats/codecs in future.

You can install thoggen as follows:

$ sudo apt-get install thoggen



=> Download thoggen

Other tools and back-ends

=> You need to install various libraries to use the above mentioned tools such as (yum or apt-get commands will install them automatically for you):

libdvdcss2 – Simple foundation for reading DVDs – runtime libraries.

libdvdnav4 – DVD navigation library.

libdvdread4 – library for reading DVDs.

=> mencoder – Personally, I use mencoder to rip my DVDs into .avi files as follows:

mencoder dvd: // 2 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec =mpeg4:vhq: vbitrate = "1200" -vf scale -zoom -xy 640 -oac mp3lame -lameopts br = 128 -o / nas / videos / my-movies / example / track2.avi mencoder dvd://2 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:vbitrate="1200" -vf scale -zoom -xy 640 -oac mp3lame -lameopts br=128 -o /nas/videos/my-movies/example/track2.avi

Please note that AcidRip, is a graphical frontend for mencoder.

=> VLC – Yes, VLC can rip DVDs too.

=> FFmpeg – A complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video.

=> Hybrid – It is a multi platform (Linux/Mac OS X/Windows) Qt based frontend for a bunch of other tools which can convert nearly every input to x264/x265/Xvid/VP9/… + ac3/ogg/mp3/aac/flac inside an mp4/m2ts/mkv/webm/mov/avi container, a Blu-ray or an AVCHD structure.

=> Wine – It is an open source software for running Windows applications on other operating systems. You can use popular MS-Windows application such as DVDFab to rip encrypted DVD’s and DVD Shrink to shrink them to smaller size. I do not *recommend* and encourage this option as it goes against the FOSS philosophy. The following screenshot based on trial version of DVDFab:



=> Transcode is a suite of command line utilities for transcoding video and audio codecs, and for converting between different container formats. Transcode can decode and encode many audio and video formats. Both K9Copy and dvd::rip are a graphical frontend for transcode.

See also:

Have a favorite Linux DVD ripper software or ripping tip? Let’s hear about it in the comments below.