DVD Ripping in 16:9

[Russell]

I am not a complete newbie but think this is the best place for my question.
I have been using Wonderfox DVD Ripper Pro for some time, and lately I have found it lacking. It rips in 16:9 but does not support the variations found in 16:9, eg 2.2:1. The resulting rips play okay when played with VLC, albeit with black bars at top and bottom, but when burned to DVD with VSO ConvertXtoDVD the results are a slight squashing of the picture which is off putting,:(
Does someone have a preferred DVD ripper that will rip in 2.2:1 or other formats within the 16:9 umbrella?
Can anyone suggest an alternative authoring application?

[manono]

Ripping is the act of transferring the DVD to the hard drive, in the process removing any encryption. Anything else is reencoding or converting. To put the DVD onto the hard drive you only need a decent decrypter.

If you're having aspect ratio problems after reencoding for another DVD, then it's either the fault of the program or of you. If it's 2.2:1, it's supposed to have black bars above and below. Any DVD with the video wider than about 1:78:1 should have black bars. I might suggest you use AvsToDVD (https://www.videohelp.com/software/AVStoDVD) for the job.

[qyot27]

The DVD-Video specification only supports 4:3 or 16:9 flagging. Like manono said, any other ratio is pillarboxed/letterboxed in the stream itself, so software that does give you cropped/resized files in 2.39:1 or whatnot isn't ripping, it's transcoding.

If you want something as accurate as possible (a 1:1 copy that just gets rid of the encryption), you're going to want to look at the old mainstays of DVD Decrypter, vobcopy (command line, for Linux), or even SmartRipper (still reliable in most cases, despite being ancient). MakeMKV is a last resort only because its DVD ripping ability lacks the Backup option that it allows for Blu-ray, but as far as modern rippers, it's probably the most accessible and comprehensive one for dealing with non-DVD-spec stuff that tries to stop people from ripping [some] modern discs. Just get used to having to deal with MPEG2-in-MKV and no disc structure, because MakeMKV can only rip titles, not even by-chapter (IIRC).

When you have that copy of the disc, you can either play it back in your media player of choice (many of them have cropping functions if you feel the need to crop to 2.39:1 on playback) or process it yourself using third-party tools to ensure the output files are the ratio you want them in.

[SeeMoreDigital]

To confuse matters more for a newbie...

The MPEG-2 video stream used with the DVD format has been encoded using 'non-square' pixel resolutions of either 720x576 for PAL discs or 720x480 for NTSC discs... So prior to being converted to square pixels, they will look a weird shape!