How To: Convert DVD Files to AVI

So this weekend (a whole other story that isn't appropriate for this blog) I was handed a homemade DVD disc, the kind that some of the new camcorders record to directly. This is amazingly convenient for watching the movie on a TV, but we wanted to rip the movie from the disc and email it around so everyone could watch the clip on their PC.

This is trickier than you might think: DVD files, even non-encrypted ones like those created by a camcorder, are stored in a proprietary format. Size is another concern: The three-minute video clip was 150MB large, much too big to email around. (The camcorder may also come with software to make this easy, but I didn't have access to it.)

After a little research, I stumbled upon this utility, AutoGK, a free tool for converting VOB files (the native DVD video format) to AVI. After installing and a little trial and error, I had created a 40MB version of the file that was a little more manageable and could be viewed by anyone with the Divx codec (also included in the AutoGK package).

There are many other ways to rip DVD to computer-friendly formats, but few of them are free like AutoGK. It's also amazingly full of features: You can add a second audio track, subtitles, the works! The best feature: Just enter a target size for the file, and the compression system automatically shrinks the size of the window and the quality of the video appropriately: My 10MB file was much too small, but my 40MB one was fine.

Note of course that AutoGK is not for ripping commercial DVDs, which is currently of questionable legality... and probably the subject for another post, another day.