Recently (and many times in the past) I have heard many members say “I have dvd's I want to upload to share, but I don't have a clue how to rip them”. There are many methods to rip a DVD to your hard drive for uploading, and the focus of this tutorial will be on using Fairuse Wizard to rip your dvd's to DivX. I've been ripping and uploading for QSS since 2007, and have used this software exclusively. Anyone familiar with my posts know I stand by my rip quality, and now I am going to let the cat out of the bag so to speak.

What you will need:

• A Computer with a DVD drive
• The DivX codec installed on your computer
• Fairuse Wizard installed on your computer
  
  Fairuse Wizard 2.9 Download
  
  CODE
  http://www.mediafire.com/?iddzmn3zvyy
  
  
• A DVD (movie) to rip
• Between 3-4 hours to kill

*** the Fairuse Download includes the subrip program in the RAR file... I don't use it, so it will NOT be covered in this tutorial***

I know there is some software out there that might rip a little faster, but you have to mux, or sync the audio with the video with separate software... Fairuse will do it ALL for you, including working with subtitles. So, keeping that in mind, please no replies with “software A does this” or “Software B is more user friendly”... be that as it may, this is a tutorial on THIS software for those of you that want the blow by blow for flawless rips.

Stage 1: Setting up the program

Assuming you already have DivX and Fairuse installed, the first thing you want to do is open up fairuse wizard.



We are going to set some basic options that will persist for every rip you make until you change them. Click the options button at the bottom of the program window, and a new window will open with some basic options you can set as 'standard” behavior. From the Screenshot below, you will see the settings I use as my standard settings ( for your output folder, its usually good to output all your rips into a designated folder to keep track of them). I've done the screenshot to save on some typing (lazy me).



Once you have your basic settings, you can click the next button and it will bring you back to the opening program screen.

Stage 2: Setting your project name, folder, and building your movie chain files

Next, you want to insert your DVD and give it a few seconds to get settled in the drive. For this tutorial, I am going to be ripping Tales of Terror from Tokyo Volume 3 part 2. The first thing we are going to do is click the create new project, name our project and set the project folder (see the screenshot).



Once you have your project files output folder set, an the project named, click next and you'll see a pop up asking you which drive to rip from (select your DVD drive or an ISO file stored on your PC).



If you notice, it says fairuse won't rip copy protected discs.... I have YET to find a disc it would not convert, so don't panic. If you do come across one it won't rip, get a program called AnyDVD, it'll nuke the copy protection easy enuff. Once you have your ISO/DVD selected, click next and you will see a screen where you actually select the video segment to be ripped.



Now, if you take a good look at this screen you'll notice I have the checkbox in the lower left set to hide any video chains that have a time of 120 seconds or less.... this hides video parts like menu items and the FBI warning crap. You will notice the main movie by the run time on the list. Here you can see the one over an hour long... thats our target file (take notice of the audio and subtitle languages)... Highlight it, and click next. Now we come to the screen where it will build your file chain.



This can take anywhere from 5 minutes to 45 minutes, depending on the length of your movie and the size of the main movie file on the DVD. Now, go get something to drink, feed the pets, beat the kids... whatever you feel is suitable to pass the time.

Stage 3: Frame positioning and subtitles

On this next screen



you will see a ton of options to play with... this is the screen where you can control the “boundaries” of your movie, the start and end points (only mess with this if you are doing a small example scene for your rip) set the subtitles, and even hard code a logo into the movie if you want (we won't be doing that). You can play with these as you see fit, it really depends on the movie you are ripping and a little experimenting can take place if you so desire, or you can just leave it the way it is. Here is the breakdown of each section:

• Left Side Top-Video Range controls... here you can set the start and end point of your video
• Left side- Your cropping controls... you can manually crop, use the autoset, select an aspect ratio, or leave it as is
• Bottom- Subtitle controls... here you can choose whether or not to add the subtitles from the DVD to the rip. For this rip, the audio is in english (information taken from the video list screen) so I will not be adding subtitles. If you do add subtitles, the 5% safety zone is more than adaquet for the bottom of the movie. Once you have everything set to your liking, click next.

Section 4: Field Frame Combination

This section is a no-brainer... just click auto detect and let it select the field frame option itself. Once this is done, click next and continue to the next screen.

Section 5: Video, Audio, and Screen Resolutions

There are a lot of options here... I'm not going to get into every one of them, just the quick and dirty to get you a good quality rip... you can play around with this stuff later at your liesure.



The Breakdown:

• Video Encodings- I have DivX selected, and two pass checked off. You will see an initial file size of 700MB with a bitrate below it. You want to click the up arrow and increas your file size until your bitrate reads 1100 (sometimes it will go a little bit above like you see in the screenshot)
• Audio Encodings- You see the audio here... if you wish to change the audio language, now is the time. To the right, you can set it to AC3, MP3, etc... I suggest AC3, because we are not working with music here... AC3 sounds far better in movies than MP3 does.
• Resolution- Here you have many options... I normally enable HD resolutions, and set it to one of the 720x resolutions, 720x400 if its available. This is your preference, but the bigger the resolution, the more ppl will enjoy your rip
• Output file segments- Here you can tell fairuse how many file segments to split the rip into. Most file hosts for DivX limit you to 1GB, so if you find your file is pushing over 900MB, the wise bet is to split it. For this tutorial, I will not be splitting it tho. You can also make it split at every chapter as well (I've never seen a reason to do this, but hey, we are all different, right?)

Once you are satisfied ith the settings, click next.

Section 6: The Big Wait

Now, you will see a screen that tells you how many audio and video encodes you have pending.



It will first encode the audio, this could take anywhere from 5 mins to 45 mins depending on your movie. Once the Audio is done, the video encoding will start, and that as well will vary in time depending on the video size and time on the DVD. Go do something fun to kill the time, like post on the forums maybe... or pop in chat and give Poohluvs a hard time. Once the video encoding has completed a quick screen will come up telling you it is writing the output file. Click finish and you can then go watch your rip, upload it, give it to some hungry kids in Africa, whatever floats your boat.

I hope this tutorial will help some of you get familiar with the wonderful and time consuming world of ripping.... I'll post a tutorial later in the month on how to make fairuse rip multiple videos such as all the episodes on a TV show DVD with multiple episodes all at once. Enjoy.

No sticky buy I'm certainly adding it to the QSS Tools! Thank you very much V1p3r! Awesome tutorial!

the multi-episode rip tutorial should be done and ready by next week.

I'm giving this a go as I type. I wanted to find something else to use other than DVDFAB which is no longer working for me. Halfway through. So far so good. It looked daunting at first but your instructions and screenshots are making my rip an easy task. Thank you.

*I'm getting a bad data format error and am unable to rip. Can't see why.*

can you PM me some screenshots of it? Also, what dvd are you ripping? (post me the UPC code on the back)