how to simply rip the MPEG2 out of a DVD?

[bugmenotwillyou]

I've set myself up a huge home media server (3TB), and I want to put my most frequently watched DVDs on there so I don't have to get up off my lazy ass to switch DVDs. I would think this should be relativly easy to do, because the video is already in mpeg2 and whatnot...I don't want to do any transcoding or anything...just rip the video/audio in its existing format. I've tried a crapload of things...but can't find anything that actually works nicely. I've ripped the VOB's off with DVD Decrypter, tried demuxing with vobedit and rejig....vobedit seems to mess up when there's multiple angles (or something)...but rejig seems to be able to give me a nice m2v...but now I just can't figure out how to remux the m2v and ac3(s) back together nicely. I've tried TMPGEnc's MPEG Tools to do it, but it comes out all choppy....I've tried bbmpg, and it comes out really good, but slightly out of sync. I've read on other forums that muxman is really good to do that...but I can't figure out how to make muxman output an mpg instead of VOBs. I've started looking at commercial suite-type software, but it seems most of them can just go mpg->vob, not the other way around....and the ones that I've found which do go the other way around seem to all take it apon themselves to transcode the video for me with noticable loss in quality, which I really don't want. Am I missing something here?...I'd think what I'm trying to do should be easier that this...

[CWR03]

Can you not play the ripped .vob's in Windows Media Player? Did you rip in IFO mode with main movie files and only Angle 1 selected? An option would be to rip in ISO mode, then mount the image with a virtual drive.

[setarip_old]

I don't want to do any transcoding or anything...just rip the video/audio in its existing format.

Is ther any reason you can't simply use DVD Decrypter in "File Mode" (Select "ALL" files, NOT "movie" files) to save the full DVDs to your system - and then use "VideoLAN" player ("VLC"), or "Media Player Classic", or "WinDVD", or "PowerDVD" for playback?

[bugmenotwillyou]

well actually I'm using an Avelink player to stream the content over the network to my TV, and it can play the raw VOB's (the main reason I didn't want to do that is I didn't want to have to manually move to the next VOB 4 or 5 times during a movie)...but I just figured out that you can simply concat the VOBs together to make 1 big file, and it works...so that's good now.....but I still would like to be able to convert them to true mpeg2 so that I can edit them in vegas or something....ideally I'd just like to be able to specify a cutlist, and just trim specific pieces out....

[CWR03]

In that case there should be no reason you can't rip the .vob's in either file mode or IFO mode with splitting set to None, where you'd end up with one large file. File mode will introduce multiple angles into the stream, so you'd end up seeing opening credits in different languages switching about every four seconds, so you may prefer IFO mode.

DVD rips are in MPEG-2 format - you should be able to edit them with any program with an MPEG-2 plugin. You may only need to change the extension to .mpg so the program will see them.