So you've got the DVD in the drive and have found the start and end times (hours, minutes, seconds) of the clip you want. Start up AoA DVD Ripper and load the DVD as below. Select the drive and title from the list and click OK.
The listing will fill with the titles found on the DVD. Select the correct title and tick the box next to it. If it's a feature film it should be the longest and will be already selected. If it's a TV series as below then the episodes will usually but not always be in the correct order. You have to go by the running times to be sure. I'm selecting episode three here - episode one is listed twice, something that often happens.
Make sure AVI is selected in the Convert To box. Choose the language and subtitles you want. The Output Directory is the folder where your AVI file will end up. Normally you won't need to change these settings.
Step 2 is selecting the Movie Clip so click here:
Type in the start and end times of the clip in hours:minutes:seconds format - it's very fussy about this. The preview frames won't actually show up until you click the + or - buttons so do this a couple of times.
Now things can start to get awkward. The chances are the times used by AoA won't match those on your player so you're going to have to adjust them. Click the buttons until the correct start and end frames are showing.
Sometimes the preview frames will become corrupted. In this case there's nothing for it but to quit the program and restart.
Now you need to configure the output settings so click here:
The format of my test DVD is PAL 4:3 interlaced, and I only want a half-sized picture. Consulting the table in the previous post gives the settings for frame-rate and width / height. Choose the Xvid MPEG-4 Codec for the video and MP3 for the audio. These give excellent results and are the most widely compatible across different platforms.
Now click on the Configure... button. The choices you make here affect the picture quality and file size of the AVI clip.
The Encoding type should be Single pass. The Target quantizer determines the picture quality. Set it to 1 for the best results, with higher values being steadily worse. If you want a smaller file then a value of 5 is about the highest that is useful. A value of 2 is a good compromise if you want to post a fair quality clip online.
Everything's set now so click here to start ripping:
As it encodes AoA will display a preview frame and a progress report. When it's done you must hit Back before you can do anything else. Be warned that encoding video can take a long time depending on your system (several times longer than the clip itself runs) and often turns out wrong and has to be done over again. Use the thumbnail picture dimensions to save time here before moving on to full size.
The output folder should open automatically for you to find your AVI clip. Open it and test it. Any good? If something's gone wrong change some settings and try it again. A common problem is the clip ending too soon. This just happened with my test clip and I had to add six seconds to the ending time.
So here's my finished AVI clip playing with standard Media Player. It's just 2.5MB in size for 40 seconds running time with passable picture quality, but I'm still not too happy with it. The quality setting I chose was a bit low, the border is ragged, and the start and end times need tuning by a few fractions of a second. Later on I'll discuss how to fix these problems to get the (almost) perfect clip.
Download the clip from Rapidshare: Reeves and Mortimer Spot Skit
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