Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Warning: Ripping a Commercial DVD, even for backup purposes, is illegal in many countries. However, ripping your own home videos is not illegal.
Whether you’re filling out your home-built media centre, or transferring video from DVD to another format, at some point you’re likely to need to rip a DVD and encode it to a different format. Depending on your media and your system, the process can be really fast or really slow.
So, what do you need to rip and encode video, and just how quick is the process? I set out to find the answers to these questions using 4 test systems. The systems ranged from a single core Athlon XP 2800+ with 512MB of RAM to an Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q8300 with 4GB of RAM. For the experiment, I used 2 AMD-based systems and 2 Intel-based systems. Some of the results were quite surprising. The exact specifications for each system used are as follows:
• pluto - AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (2.1GHz) with 512MB RAM (2 x 256MB), onboard SiS video (128MB), LG GSA-H55N DVD burner, and a Maxtor 6L040J2 hard drive.
• venus - Intel Core 2 Duo (3.2GHz) with 1GB RAM (2 x 512MB), onboard ATI Radeon X1300 video (128MB), a Benq DW1650 DVD burner, and a 250GB Western Digital WD2500JS-60N hard drive.
• saturn - AMD Phenom II X4 905e (2.5GHz) with 4GB RAM (4 x 1GB), an ATI Radeon HD3450 video card (256MB), a TSSTCorp SH-S183L DVD burner, and a 2TB Seagate ST2000DL003-9VT1 hard drive.
• jupiter - a stock Dell Inspiron 545, Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300 (2.5GHz), 4GB RAM (4 x 1GB), ATI Radeon X800 onboard video (128MB), a TSSTCorp TS-H653G DVD burner, and a 500GB Western Digital WD5000AAKS-7 hard drive.
At the end of the experiment I also changed up the first system, pluto, doubling the RAM, changing out the DVD burner, and adding a 256MB video card.
For software I used Ubuntu 10.04-LTS on pluto, venus, and jupiter, and 12.04-LTS on saturn. For ripping and encoding I’m fond of Acidrip, I find it synchronizes audio and video well. To keep the time for the total process down I made some adjustments to Acidrip’s default settings.
On the general screen I used the settings shown above.
The settings here are not much different from the defaults - other than the fact that I chose to encode with the pcm Codec, and selected English. The file size adjusts when I adjust the settings on the Video settings tab. The Video settings tab of Acidrip is shown above.
Most of the changes I made to the default settings of Acidrip are on the Video settings tab. It's important to note here that I did not set the width and height to 480×320, more specifically note that I unchecked the scale and crop check boxes. What I did check was the Lock Bits/Px box. Once the box is adjusted, I adjust the bitrate up or down so that the Lock Bits/Px reads between 0.150 and 0.200. The higher the number, the larger the file size on the general tab. I also set the Video codec to lavc. The last changes I made were on the Settings tab which is shown above right.
On the settings screen, I set Acidrip to Cache DVD and to Eject the DVD when it's done caching.
The whole process is really 2 steps: ripping the DVD, which consists of copying the DVD contents to the hard drive, and encoding the DVD contents to a compressed format. The DVD ripping process can be very quick depending on the hardware used. The encoding process is normally much longer. Interestingly, wrong or bad hardware can actually make the ripping process take almost as long as the encoding process (more on this later).
For the experiment I chose a DVD that was 91 minutes long, the length of a typical feature movie.
As expected, pluto, the single core, slowest system, performed the slowest - it took 12 minutes and 9 seconds to rip the DVD, and a whopping 2 hours, 39 minutes and 27 seconds to complete both the ripping and encoding process.
Venus, the dual core system, produced some very surprising results - clocking in hands down with the fastest DVD rip at 4 minutes and 52 seconds. The entire process, ripping and encoding, took 51 minutes and 33 seconds.
Another surprise came from saturn which beat all the systems by completing the whole process in 37 minutes and 14 seconds, but took 11 minutes and 37 seconds to rip the DVD.
Jupiter, the stock quad core Dell, ripped the DVD slightly slower than saturn, with 3 seconds difference between the two, but took over 3 minutes longer for the whole process at 40 minutes and 25 seconds.
From these results we can draw some interesting conclusions: a good DVD burner does matter in the large scheme of things. Despite having a slower CPU and less memory, venus, the dual core system out-ripped both quad core systems with less than half the time. The Benq DW1650 literally destroyed the other DVD burners when it came to ripping performance. If you're only ripping one DVD, this might not be much of a concern, but multiply it by 10, 20 or 50 DVDs, and you're talking about a fair amount of time.
I was also surprised that the AMD quad core outperformed the Intel quad core. I chocked up the win to the fact that I had a 256MB video card in the AMD system - until I ran one more experiment.
For the last test I added a 256MB AGP video card to pluto, the single core AMD Athlon XP 2800+ system. I also added 1GB of RAM (2GB actually, but the system only recognized 1GB despite the motherboard manual indicating the system would recognize 2GB), and a Memorex 3202-3269 DVD burner. I used the same DVD and settings.
Unfortunately, the time I had access to this system ran out, but I was able to get some results. The DVD ripping process took a whopping 15 minutes and 7 seconds. Whether the DVD burner was just slow or bad I'm not sure, but it lagged far behind all the others. After 1 hour, this revised pluto had encoded just 28 minutes and 7 seconds of video. The slow DVD burner no doubt slowed down the whole process, but what's really telling here is that the better video card doesn't seem to help as much as having more CPU cores. Even if we took off the 15 minutes for ripping, it's still only 28 minutes of video (of 91) ripped in 45 minutes.
Given the choice between a better video card and more CPU cores, I'd buy more CPU cores. Whether the AMD quad core won because of the video card or not I'll leave up to you to judge, but I'd like to think the AMD system was simply better than the stock Dell Intel-based quad core. The one sure thing is that if you're planning on ripping a large DVD collection, you can save a significant amount of time by picking up a DVD burner like the one mentioned in this article.