Fig. 1 K9copy's Startup Screen

For many years, Windows has enjoyed a number of free software tools for making backup copies of DVDs. The most popular among these offerings is DVD Shrink.

Now it's possible to get the same backup abilities plus the ability to rip DVD titles to XVID, MPEG4 or Matroska x264 AVI files under Linux using K9Copy.

Refering to Figure 2, the "Input device" combo box selects the desired DVD drive, while the folder buttons to the right of the combo box provide dialog boxes for selecting a hard drive folder or an ISO image file.

For the "Output device", the user can choose to use an ISO image file or a DVD drive. If a DVD drive is selected, then the second combo box is used to select the desired writing speed such as 2X, 4X, 6X, etc.

Once you have selected your input source, K9copy will read the titles and give a listing in the main window like this:

You can expand the "tree" of titles on the DVD to examine the available chapters, audio and video streams associated with a particular title, etc. If you have a particularly large DVD you are trying to backup to 4.7GB media, then use this view to remove extras that you don't want.

Examine the settings for DVD backups under Settings->DVD (or use the "wrench" icon) and adjust them as required to fit your output media, burn directly to the drive, etc.

If you are backing up the entire DVD, just check the first box and all of the titles will be selected. Next, click on "Shrink Factor" and adjust the value (if needed) to get the indicator into the "green" zone. This indicator is an estimate of the total output size after the DVD content has been shrunk. It's based on 4.7GB single layer media. Make certain to check the "Keep original menus" box unless you want K9copy to remaster the DVD with dvdauthor and just have a simple set of chapters that start playing automatically.

 Ripping a DVD title to an MPEG4 encoded AVI file saves a lot of disk space. A 4GB size DVD title can be compressed down to less than 1GB. Video quality can suffer, but with the proper selection of compression options, the quality can be surprisingly good.

Click Settings->MPEG-4 to get the setup window for the compression settings.

The first combo box provides selection of the compression type. Xvid, MPEG4 and compression types are supported. Compression size and quality are greatest/lowest with Xvid and least/highest with X264. If you can wait, checking the "2 passes" box will increase video quality, but you can expect to double the amount of time it takes to compress the video stream.

Next, you can select the desired output filesize and number of files. Increasing the resulting filesize will result in a higher average video bitrate (better video quality). Vary decent video quality is obtained at 700-900MB size using MPEG4. You might wish to experiment with the size, or just select a larger filesize. A file of 2GB size is still a lot smaller than a DVD with 7GB of data! The number of resulting files can also be set. Usually, this is just "1".

Finally, you can adjust the resulting output width and height for the video frames, keep the aspect ratio of the original title and adjust the audio bitrate. NTEC DVDs have 720x480 video streams while PAL DVDs have 720x576 frames. The default audio bitrate of 128 is a bit low. If you are ripping music videos, then you might want higher audio bitrates, say 192 or more.

Apply your settings and then click the "Create MPEG-4" button on the main toolbar to start the ripping process. You will get a dialog window asking your for the name of the AVI file to save the output to and then a progress window will appear:

 Fig. 9 Transcoding Progress Window

 K9copy provides a simple user interface for backing up DVDs to single layer DVD media and ripping individual titles from the DVD into AVI files. Ripping is K9copy's weaker function, but it can be improved with additional settings. It's most annoying "feature" is the fact that it wiill re-encode any selected audio stream into MP3. This is not something that is desirable when dealing with concert videos. An option should be given to allow copying of the original audio stream at the very least, better if options are given to convert to other stream types such as AC3, etc.