I'm a child psychologist and for an experiment I need to be able to reward kids by showing them clips of their favourite programs. So I can get a stack of kids DVDs, but I was wondering about the most efficient way to rip clips from them to AVI (or some other PC-displayable format). I understand that ripping an entire DVD to hard drive takes a lot of time and hard drive space, so given I'll be doing it a lot, I would rather just get clips! Anyone know a way? I don't mind spending a bit of money on a program although obviously I'd rather not!
If I really am going to have to rip the whole thing, can anyone recomend the most efficient way for a newbie to do that?
Oh by the way I expect these DVDs are copy protected so the method needs to cope with that. I realise that what I want to do may not be strictly legal, I'm not really bothered.
You can use the free program DVD Shrink and choose start and end frames to rip your clip. You can then take the clips and join them into one video and burn them to a DVD, which will play on your PC. Or convert them to AVI format using a program like IMTOO or Xillisoft. Guide for Shrink here.
You will need a burning program free ones are DVD Decrypter or Imgburn. They only do iso format so you must save your clip in that format. DVD Decrypter available from the bbmayo link. Imgburn available here
Worked a dream with the one DVD I have tried it with so far. A tip for anyone else: use DVD Shrink to copy the clip to DVD files on the hard drive, and then use AutoGK (http://www.autogk.me.uk/) to convert those DVD files into .avi. All the software is freeware and each step of the process only takes a few minutes max for a short clip.
