pittle

Today was one of those “first time” moments in my life and what I am about to share with you is something that anyone out there must give a shot right away.

There are very few of things left that keep me attached to a non-free software operating system. One of those, which particularly interests me, is backing up my DVD movies. Now, some may ask “what’s the big deal?”, but if you tend to repeat this process at least a couple of times in a week you’ll agree with me how this may get complicated more than you were expecting to be.

There are tons of non-free softwares around to accomplish the job with (almost) a single click, but none (not even a single one, at least not to my knowledge) reliable free software which painlessly would do the job (well… this is relative I know, but we are talking about (end-)user experience here and command line stuff is definitely out of league).

Now, let me introduce you Thoggen, a DVD backup utility, based on GStreamer and Gtk+, as they defined on their site. This utility will read from DVD and save your movie in Theora format, which is free.

Once you insert your DVD media to your DVD drive, you have to open Thoggen:

Thoggen will show up and read the DVD media (If Thoggen complains that libdvdcss2 is not present in your system, so that it cannot proceed, you just have to download and install one single Medibuntu package and restart Thoggen after that):

Usually Thoggen is clever enough to detect the correct title that contains actual movie (hint: “1:30 hours”). Either this isn’t the case for you or you want to something different, just pick the title(s) you’re interesting in backing up and click “OK”:

At this step, if you’re not interested in nothing else, but backing up your movie you can just click “OK” and you’re done.

Just in case, if you’d like to make some decisions about your final product (picture size, quality, file size, where to save your output file, etc.) the window showing up here is pretty clear (you may or not do all or any of these):

• Pick a picture size from drop down list
• Crop your movie here and there (for instance if you want to cutout upper and lower strips present in the movie)
• Decide if you’re interested in quality or in a certain file size (this is useful if you’re thinking to burn a CD or a DVD with it and size matters to you)
• Pick where to save output file (your home folder may not be the best place for that)
  
• Click on “Stream Information” and fill or change some information about this movie
• Click “OK” to proceed with backing up:

That’s it! Tasty isn’t it? After a couple of hours (I hope you have a better computer than mine, and you’ll save sometime there) you’ll have your movie backed up, just like that.

I shoudn’t complain much, but just for the records, one thing that I’m a little disappointed about Thoggen is the fact that you cannot disable the preview while converting movie. I think this should save a lot of processing resources, thus finishing the job earlier; but I’m sure this will be added sooner or later.

Dear reader, if you have any idea about how to rip subtitles from a DVD, please let me know either by dropping me an e-mail or commenting below.