Ripping DVDs conserving languages and subtitles

I have a collection of DVDs which occupy a lot of space and keep getting scratched by misbehaving children.
While I'm working on educating my kids, I'm actually looking for a technical solution to my problem :)
I would like to rip all these DVDs while satisfying the following requirements:
* Keep original image quality (or close)
* Keep original soundtracks in several languages
* Keep subtitles of various languages

I used HandBrake to rip DVDs which worked pretty well for image and audio, but I can't keep all the subtitles. I was only able to keep one set of subtitles as "burned in"

Any advice?

P.S. I'm a Linux user, so windows/osx only software is not an option
P.P.S I'm aware of the fact that I can make an ISO, and if there's no other option, I will. However, I prefer to use modern encodings (H.264/VP8) and enjoy ~x4 smaller files

Yoav Weiss

Posted 2011-01-26T13:54:23.077

Reputation: 103

Is making an ISO image an option for you? You could mount the image anytime (e.g. using DaemonTools and have the "original" DVD at hand.

– slhck – 2011-01-26T13:57:23.670

It is currently my fallback option, but it is ~x4 bigger then an equivalent H.264 video, and less practical (only double-click playback that worked is using VLC). – Yoav Weiss – 2011-01-26T14:02:55.983

Answers

You could use MakeMKV (Linux version available in forum) to rip the entire DVD to an MKV file, then use some utility or another to transcode the video tracks to h.264 (and audio to aac, if you wanted). You could even use Handbrake to handle the transcoding, then a bit of mkvextract/mkvmerge wizardry to pull the subtitles out of the original MKV and mux them into the smaller MKV. Then you could delete the large MKV.

afrazier

Posted 2011-01-26T13:54:23.077

Reputation: 21 316

You can rip them to .iso (image) format, which takes a lot of space (roughly 7GB per DVD) but preserves the disc 1-to-1.

Andrew Coleson

Posted 2011-01-26T13:54:23.077

Reputation: 1 835

Thanks, this is my fallback option, but I prefer H.264 and smaller files – Yoav Weiss – 2011-01-26T14:07:17.757