Legal Warning: Be advised that the process of “ripping” DVD’s is sometimes illegal by nature, regardless of where/how the ripped content is stored, regardless of whether or not the ripped content is used exclusively for personal use, and regardless of whether or not you own the original DVD content yourself. Check your local laws before doing this.

This tutorial will show you how to convert your DVD’s to .AVI video files, so that you can back them up for safe keeping…. or whatever. This is just a “how to” tutorial, it doesn’t answer any of the “how” and “why” questions, and most certainly does not condone the illegal distribution of copyrighted media. I’m assuming you own these movies and just want to store them on your computer.

1. Before you begin, ensure that you have the codecs for DivX and/or XviD.
2. Download and install DVD Decrypter.
3. Download and install Auto Gordian Knot.
4. Place the DVD into your DVD drive. Open DVD Decrypter, it should automatically try to scan the DVD if you only have one drive. If you have more than one, select the drive you’re currently using from the pulldown menu in the upper-middle of the window. Once the program has found the disk, a window will open asking you which geographical region the DVD’s protection is from and provide you with a list of options — this should be easy to answer. If for some reason you are unsure, just try the United States by default. (NOTE: This step may be optional, sometimes DVD Decrypter will automatically do it for you, or the DVD will not have any protection on it.)
5. Once you select the correct protection the disk has, it should only take a few seconds for DVD Decrypter to analyze the disk. Once it has been analyzed, go to the top bar and click “Mode” and select “IFO”.
6. You will now see a list of the different segments of the DVD in the upper-right-hand corner of the window. This is the entire contents of the disk, the main movie (or episodes), the bonuses, special features, etc. (If you want more than one of these, you will need to rip each one separately.)
7. Each segment will have a little plus sign next to it to expand the list and view its exact contents. When you expand the list, you will see several titles (but sometimes there’s only one) listed, these are the actual segments that you can rip. You will also see, right below their names, the length of each segment, DVD Decrypter will automatically highlight the longest one for you when it’s done analyzing the disk, as it assumes that’s the main move, and thus one that you will want to extract. Use the time lengths for each segment to find the main movie and/or the episodes that you want to extract. If it’s unclear what times correspond to a given movie or episode, look on the DVD box or online and try to find the exact running time(s) for the move/episodes, then look at the segments again and try to find one with that time. Also, note the left panel on the bottom-right of the window, labeled “chapters”. These are the actual scenes for the movie, and if you want, you can manually select which ones you wish to keep.
8. To extract the file that you just selected, click the button in the lower-left-hand corner that’s a picture of a DVD with a green arrow pointing to a hard drive. To specify the output folder, click the small folder icon that appears above and to the right of the Decrypt button.
9. DVD Decrypter will now take a few minutes to extract the files from the DVD. A bouncy little tune will play when the proccess has completed. In the output folder, there will be one .IFO file, and a .VOB file corresponding to every chapter in the movie.
10. When DVD Decrypter is done, exit it and open Auto Gordian Knot.
11. In the upper-left-hand corner, select the “File Input” option.
12. For the input file, click the folder button on the far right next to the text area. Browse to the folder where you extracted the origonal files to and select the first numbered .VOB file you see (if you extracted an entire movie, there will probably be several, just pick the one that ends in a “1″ and the rest will be automatically included). Once you select the VOB file, the output file will automatically name itself the same thing as the input file, only with a .AVI extension. You can leave it that way or change it to output to whatever folder you want with whatever name you want.
13. For the primary audio track, select “Audio Stream 0 AC3″. Then, assuming that there are no subtitles that you want, select “No Subtitles”. Otherwise, select the subtitle set that you want to be used.
14. Now comes the fun part, the output file size. You can choose a predefined size, a size that will make backing multiple files off onto CD’s more convenient, you can choose a custom file size, or you can simply choose the quality level of the origonal movie that you want to keep. Be sure to choose something that won’t take up too much space, yet won’t be too poor a quality. A full-length DVD will compress fairly decently into about 700MB. NOTE: The compression utility will attempt to nail the specified target size right on the head, but unfortunately is somewhat inaccurate. Thus if you specificy a 700 MB output size, it may actually generate a 700.05 MB file. This is inconsequential for the most purposes, but if you’re generating the file size based in its ability to fit nicely on, say, a CD, then it can really screw you over if it overshoots the target size by the slightest bit and is just few KB too big to fit on a CD. So if you’re going to use a preset size, I’d recommend manually setting the size to one or two MB less than the size they provide, which in this case would be 698 - 699 MB, just to ensure that it doesn’t accidentally go a little too high.
15. Then click on “Advanced Settings”. In the upper-right of the new window you can choose the output file’s resolution. “Auto width” will automatically resize the video depending on the compression level of the output file, “minimum”, “Fixed”, and “maximum” are easy enough to understand, they will, respective to their name, allow you to customly choose the size.
16. On the right side, for audio, it’s best to just leave it on “auto” and let it decide what to use automatically.
17. Then select the codec you want to use. You can choose Xvid or DivX, I personally recommend Xvid because it’s open source. Don’t worry about it though, either way it doesn’t really matter.
18. Then check the boxes for advanced subtitle settings, the names themselves should be explanatory enough, if you don’t want to do anything fancy, just ignore this. When done click “OK”.
19. Now, back on the main AutoGK screen, click “Add Job”. You should see the name of the output file now appear in the white box in the bottom right of the window. In this way, you can queue up as many jobs as you want. However, note that the jobs will all SHARE the same settings. All the settings you just configured will apply to ALL the jobs that you place in the queue. If you change a setting during the conversion process, the change will apply to all the jobs still waiting in the queue that are not being currently processed.
20. If you’re done configuring everything to your liking, click “Start” and AutoGK will run through the queue of jobs that you gave it. You’ll see another window open up in the background, it should close soon and be replaced by a cmd-prompt window, which will be replaced by another normal window, which will eventually close and immediately be replaced by another window, so don’t panic when you see windows opening and closing on your taskbar. The first two windows are for pre-processing and calculations, and the last two are for converting the video and the audio. During the conversion, if you open one of the last two windows and click “Dub in progress!” and “Show status window” you can view a window showing more detailed stats of the conversion progress. The conversion progress is very CPU intensive, but AutoGK is configured to not suck up too much of your CPU, so you may not even notice that it’s running. It takes me about 1.5 hours to convert a 22 minute episode. Your best bet is probably to set up a few hours worth of jobs in the queue and let it convert them overnight.
21. Once AutoGK is done with the conversion, go to the VIDEO_TS folder that you ripped the origonal .VOB file to (or where ever you chose to output the .AVI) and move the new .AVI to where ever you want to store it.
22. Delete the contents of the VIDEO_TS folder that was created by DVD Decrypter when it ripped the original .VOB file. This folder is going to have a respectable size at this point, between the files generated by the ripping of the .VOB and the conversion to .AVI (assuming that was your .AVI output location, if it wasn’t, then go delete the temp files created in whatever directory the .AVI was outputted to). The .AVI’s are big enough as it is, so unless you have lots of space to spare you don’t need to keep the original .VOB files around because they’re basically worthless unless you plan to convert/burn them sometime. Keeping one or two of them isn’t really bad, but if you’re going to backup several DVDs, you can start losing disk space to them really, really fast.
23. Enjoy! Now, if I would only write a tutorial on how to pop a bag of popcorn….

What I gave here was just a somewhat fundamental tutorial as far as using options in these two programs. I would advise that you go under “Tools” and “Settings” in DVD Decrypter and play around if you want to tweak it to your own personal needs/liking.