Select Page

When we buy a DVD for our 6 year old, the first thing that comes to mind is – how long before it gets scratched (or ruined, lost, broken), etc. Ever bought one of those Beach Body work out video sets for $150 and thought – what happens when one won’t play anymore? It’s not like they’re going to send you a replacement, unless you send another $150. So the question was, how do I rip, backup, and burn certain DVD’s in my collection (which is completely legal)?

I have been using Ubuntu on my desktop for the last 7 years or so. Ever since version 10, upgrades to 11 and now 12 have been pretty painless. However, they don’t exactly give you tools “out of the box” to rip DVD’s (even though they are available). Maybe you had (at one point) the ability to rip DVD’s, and since upgrading to the latest Ubuntu version – now you can’t anymore.

The solution is – quite simple. You can easily install any “dvd rip” package from your Ubuntu Software center. Like DVD:Rip, K9Copy (which I like), Thoggen, AcidRip, or OGMRip (all work well). You will find, however, that out of the box even though the tools are installed, you can’t rip anything. Some give an error, some don’t and just do nothing.

The piece you are lacking is a dvd decrypter, because the DVD’s you have an encrypted with encoding keeping you from backing up or copying them. You need to installed the libdvdcss2 decrypting library for Linux to allow the software to rip the dvd’s.

You would think that this would work on the command line:
sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2

However, you’ll get an error saying you can’t install this because it’s not available in the repository.

This Mediabunty page describes how to do that.

In a nutshell you need to enable the right repository to get libdvdcss2 by running this on the command line:

sudo wget –output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list && sudo apt-get –quiet update && sudo apt-get –yes –quiet –allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get –quiet update

now you can run this command to install it again (and it will work):

sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2

Now run your DVD ripping program(s) and they should (all) work just fine. The only issue now will be what format to do the ripping in and if you have installed ffmpeg and/or mplayer properly – and if your computer has enough CPU and memory (and hard drive space) to do the ripping.

Have fun backing up and copying your DVD collection!