How to rip DVD to MP4 on your Ubuntu PC

Burning an image to disk

Since i used Ubuntu for the first time, I have always thought that Linux is the best. I have to confess that for several years I have also been using Mac, but not because it was better than Ubuntu, but because the audio editing programs in Linux are not nearly as intuitive as those on Mac, a system that just out of the box. box includes GarageBand which, without being a professional program, meets what I need. Linux can do pretty much the same thing, but with a few detours. Today we will teach you how to rip DVD to MP4. Although, before continuing, I would like to explain that I have Ubuntu on my 15 ″ laptop and Lubuntu on my 10 ″ laptop.

The good and bad about DVDs is that the videos are separate. It is good because it is the best way for the menus to work as it should, but it is bad if we want to pass their content to a single file to be able to reproduce it in any program. So, the first thing we have to do is find the .VOB files that, except for unlikely surprise, will be in the folder VIDEO_TS. Here are the steps to follow to join and convert all those files into a single MP4.

How to convert a DVD to MP4

  1. To make things easier, we copy the contents of that folder in an accessible place. In this case we will use the desktop.
  2.  To join them, we will use a command that uses the cat program. This program is available in most GNU / Linux distributions. We go into the folder where we leave the .VOB files, open a terminal and write the following:
cat *.VOB > movie.vob

convert-to-mp4

  1. The next thing will be to convert the file to MP4. For this, a pretty good program is HandBrake. So, if we don't have it installed, we install it. We open a Terminal and write:
sudo apt-get install handbrake

install-handbrake

  1. How could it be otherwise, the next step is to open HandBrake.
  2. We click on Origin.

handbrake

  1. We select the movie.vob file that we created in step 2.
  2. We choose the format. Here we can choose what we prefer, but since in this tutorial we are talking about MP4, we select MPEG-4 (avformat).
  3. We click finish and wait. Converting videos is usually a long process. Since we are talking about a DVD, converting the entire movie may take as long as the movie itself, so be patient.

And we would have it. Now we can play it on any computer, whether or not it has a DVD reader, or mobile device. Of course, I didn't want to say goodbye without saying that in Ubunlog we do not support piracy. This tutorial is for creating backup copies of your own content.


5 comments, leave yours

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  1.   Abraham L.C. said

    Thank you very much for the contribution. Without going into piracy, I was interested in something like this because I have a collection of DVD's that I still managed to buy when it was seen that they were in decline and now that I only have the DVD player on my PC, I want to transfer them to a file and be able to make them "last," even when DVD devices die out.

  2.   Enrique Catheart said

    Thank you very much, it helped me !!!

  3.   leonardo rodriguez said

    Thanks for the tutorial! It was very useful to me!

  4.   David Lopez said

    Hello, thanks for the tutorial. Like other forum members, I did not take advantage of it for piracy, but to save an educational video that is more than 15 years old. It should be noted that with ffmpeg, without the need for handbrake, I was able to convert to mp4, although initially without subtitles. If one wants subtitles using ffmpeg, one has to follow a slightly more complex process, documented here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72318986/hardcoding-subtitles-from-dvd-or-vob-file-with-ffmpeg

  5.   Omar said

    Thank you very much!! Right now I'm converting my wedding DVD so I can watch it on TV.