Ripping Your DVDs to DVR-MS

If you spend any time at all with Windows Media Center one of the things you’ll want to eventually do is rip your movie collection to Media Center. You would probably head over to The Green Button for suggestions on the best approach. You would very quickly see that there are more options and methods for this than can possibly be covered in a single blog post. Instead I’m going to detail how I’ve chosen to rip my DVD collection. This post won’t cover Blurays as I don’t even have a Bluray drive.

Pros and Cons to this Approach

Pros:

• 5.1 surround sound fully supported.
• Fast forward and rewind work.
• Videos play on the Media Center PC and on Media Center Extenders.
• All of the software involved is free.

Cons:

• No menus or extras. Only the main video file is ripped.
• No compression is used, so files are usually between four and six gigabytes.

Step 1: Rip the DVD

I’m not going to go into great detail on ripping the DVD as there are numerous articles out there on how to rip a DVD. The main thing is that you want to have a single VOB file of the main movie. I have primarily used DVD Decrypter and DVD Shrink. If using DVD Shrink I would avoid using compression. I haven’t actually tried compressing the VOB using DVD Shrink, but the paranoid part of me thinks it could cause problems with the conversions later.

Step 2: Convert the VOB to MPEG

Once you have created your single VOB file, which should be a few gigabytes if it’s a normal length movie, the next step is to convert it to an MPEG file. This conversion doesn’t take long, because you’re really only swapping the container. To do this you’re going to need to download a couple of things. First off you will need DVRMSToolbox (DTB.) Of course if you’ve been doing anything with your Windows Media Center at all, you already have this, right? If not, head over to Andy Van Til’s site to get it. You’ll also need to download a new DTB profile called Convert VOB to mpeg – ffmpeg. You can get his from Ben Drawbaugh’s website. Follow his instructions for copying the profile file to the correct place, and replacing the ffmpeg configuration file.

Once you have DTB setup you simply need to run the new profile against the VOB you just created. If your DVD ripping software created multiple VOB files just select the largest file for this step. After a few minutes you will have a MPEG file of the movie.

Step 3: Convert the MPEG to a Dvr-MS File

This last step is easier than step two, but you still need to download more freeware to complete it. Head back over to Andy Van Til’s site to download ToDVRMS . After unzipping it, run todvrmsgui.exe. Double-click the in file box and select the mpeg file you just created. Type the final location of your DVRMS file in the “out dvr-ms” box. Fill in the movie’s title in the next box. You can leave the rest of the boxes empty, but you should check: WM/MediaIsMovie. Then click the “go” button. A few minutes later you will have a complete dvr-ms file of your movie!

Conclusion

The results speak for themselves, but it is a little labor intensive. Anyone who is familiar with the process of creating profiles for DVRMSToolbox could probably follow these steps and create a single profile for DTB to do it all in one step, but I just haven’t gotten to that level of mastery yet.