jZnat's Journal: Why aren't there good DVD ripping programs out there?

Let's take a look at the CDDA market of ripping utilities. The whole process is blatantly easy to do nowadays thanks to a wide selection of programs that can copy and transcode CDDA along with metadata taken from an online CDDB such as freedb.org. Period.

The situation is far from that quality when it comes to DVDs. Most movies are divided into "chapters", and according to the inserts, most chapters are given names. The Matroska audio/video/textual/everything container format has full support for the chapter concept, including multiple audio and subtitle channels, and basically anything you can do when authoring a DVD. Thusly, it should be braindead simple to rip a DVD, transcode from the space-consuming MPEG-2 video codec into the superior MPEG-4 Part 2 [ISO/IEC 14496-2] or Part 10 [ISO/IEC 14496-10, H.264] video codec (or even an alternative such as Theora), optionally transcode to a smaller audio codec such as Vorbis, LAME VBR MP3 [ISO/IEC 11172-3], or even MPEG-4 Part 3 [ISO/IEC 14496-3] AAC, rip the subtitles into a textual format (e.g. OpenSub's SRT), fetch the chapter information and other metadata from an online database of movies and other DVD contents (similar to an IMDB and FreeDB combination), and mux it all together into a nice Matroska file complete with all the information from the DVD you wanted.

So, what has prevented this sort of simplistic beauty from being written? My guess is the legality of breaking CSS content protection (although DVD Jon did win the DeCSS case on the basis of freedom of speech) which appears on most MPAA DVDs in order to rip a movie to disc is a line that nobody wants to cross (although linking to VideoLAN's libdvdcss is common in DVD viewing and ripping applications, so using libdvdcss isn't required for non-CSS DVDs anyhow). Maybe the fact that many people are helplessly depending on Microsoft's ancient AVI audio/video container format which contains no support for any of the aforementioned goodies found on DVDs is preventing anyone from going through the effort of using a relatively new (yet completely open and proven) audio/video/etc. container format. Maybe nobody wants to rip their movies and TV shows into a digital library for easy access and usage.

Whatever the reason is that we don't have such a program in either the free software world or even the proprietary software world, I'm calling bullshit on it. I think it's time someone (even if it has to be me) created this killer app for organising your video library.