Sunday, November 15, 2009

Ripping Prince Caspian Successfully



How to rip the Prince Caspian DVD.

Most newer Disney DVDs including Hannah Montana, WALL-E, Prince Caspian and many others have ARccOS and possibly some other form annoying copy protection.

MacTheRipper, DVD Shrink, and DVD Decrypter have a hard time handling the ARccOS copy protection scheme because it uses bad sectors to try and foil DVD rippers.

Tonight I initially tried to copy Prince Caspian with MacTheRipper. If no settings are changed, the application thinks that the disc is 70 GB because of the dummy sectors. This won't work at all. It will take hours for the MTR to work around the dummy sectors and most likely end up producing a VIDEO_TS folder that doesn't work anyway!


I tried the "Main Feature ARccOS extraction" option and after about 40 minutes, found out that the rip didn't work.



After heading over the MacTheRipper forum, some people had success by using the "Title Set Extraction" option and only extracting TS 10. Ripping this way will only yield the movie.

I want more than this. I want to have a DVD menu and be able to browse the chapters visually.

Thanks to This Post which said that AnyDVD for Windows worked and MTR failed, I thought I'd give it a try. This member also said that RipIt for Mac also worked, but the burn failed when Toast 9 returned an error stating that the folder was damaged. On another post, someone reported that Prince Caspian ripped successfully with DVDFab Decrypter for Windows.

AnyDVD comes to the Rescue

I got AnyDVD from the PirateBay in about 5 minutes. After firing up Parallels 3 for Mac, I installed AnyDVD on my virtual Windows XP system. It prompted me to uninstall DVD43 because it said there was a serious conflict, probably because both of them are software drivers that work with the DVD data directly. The prompt provided an option to uninstall DVD43, so I accepted the uninstall.

After inserting the Prince Caspian disc, AnyDVD took about 1 minute to do its magic scanning the disc to analyze the copy protection.



I fired up DVD Shrink, opened the disc, and removed all the extra languages and half a dozen or so previews that Disney stuffed on the disc. I got the movie quality up to about 70% after all the unnecessary stuff was removed.

34 minutes later and I had a working, compressed DVD ISO of Prince Caspian; with no fiddling around with settings in MacTheRipper. ( I have a MacBook Pro with a 8x DVD Burner, so your computer will probably be able to rip the disc faster if you have a desktop.)

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