Using: DVD Decrypter
Also needed: IfoEdit, FixVTS (and DVDSubEdit if you require subtitles)
I like DVD Decrypter. It's simple and efficient. The only problem is it can't automatically decode the copy protection on Sony DVDs.
The Squid and The Whale
I haven't come across many Sony copy protected DVDs that I really wanted to keep. In fact, afterwatching The Squid for 10 minutes, I gave up because the characters were so unpleasant. But I watched the director's commentary, and found it pretty interesting (very rare), so I had to go and watch the whole film.
Conditions
This will only rip the movie, not the menus. For me this is not actually a limitation, as it is my normal practice to remove all that annoying excess baggage from DVDs. The extras can also be separately ripped. I was using a region 2 (European) DVD. Other regions may have different structures and timings.
Load DVD. Launch DVD Decrypter and select Mode "IFO" from the menu bar. DVD Decrypter asks for confirmation of region. In my experience, the region proposed by DVD Decrypter has always been correct, so click OK.
You can see in the right hand panel under the input tab that DVD decrypter has pre-selected the program chain VTS_15 (PGC1).
However, if you open windows explorer and look at the file structure of the actual DVD, you can see that VTS_15 is too small to contain the movie data, and only VTS_02 is capable of being the main film (films are normally 4~5GB).
So back in DVD Decrypter, in the input panel, select VTS_02, PGC1. Now in the lower left panel, chapter 1 should be selected. Untick it, and all the cells become unticked.
If you hover the mousepointer over the cells in the lower right panel, you will see pop-up information about the individual cells. You will see that most of them are timed at less than one second. They do not contain movie information, they are all "dummies" except for cell 43, which contains 8 mins 38.19 secs.
Select tick-box 43 (and the chapter 1 tick-box automatically reselects itself).
Now click through all the other chapters; they all consist of a single cell containing several minutes of movie, until you get to chapter 12. Here only the first cell contains the movie (9 mins 17.21 secs) and all the rest are dummies. So unselect chapter 12 tick-box then select cell 54. Chapter 13 is also empty and should be unselected. Ready? On the left side of DVD Decrypter, click on "Destination" to select a suitable folder on your hard drive and then on the image/button beneath to rip.
Wait for ripping to complete...
OK, the good news is; you've beaten the system. You have some fully functional VOB files on your hard drive. These can be played in a media player such as VLC, or converted to AVI files using something like AutoGK. The bad news is; you haven't got the complete DVD structure. The ifo files are incomplete, which means you can't open it in DVD Shrink, or burn it onto a DVD.
Restoring the DVD structure
Briefly, you need to open the destination directory in windows explorer and rename al the files of type VTS_15_1.VOB etc, to VTS_01_1.VOB etc.
Next, launch IfoEdit and click on the "Create IFOs" button (the buttons along the bottom) and select the first of your newly ripped VOBs as "1st VOB of title set". This will create the IFOs (select "same as source" for destination directory).
Next, run FixVTS on the VOBs (Click "open", select the first VOB again, then click "Full DVD")
You can now open the directory using DVD shrink, and burn it onto a fresh DVD.
Unless you want to use subtitles, they are an unpleasant shade of green. You first need to use DVDSubEdit to edit the palette (or if you fancy trying it, you can probably use IfoEdit to copy the original palette from the original IFOs to your new IFOs).
Finished.
