Every so often I find myself in looking through the ex-rental DVD “bargain bin”. Quite often I find something I consider a bargain. However, the experience of watching an ex-rental DVD is typically ruined by the various trailers and marketing guff at the start which you can’t skip. My wife hates that stuff, and I love my wife, so I routinely rip the main feature of newly acquired ex-rental DVD movies so we can avoid that crap. I run a Mediatomb DLNA server and I want to load it with all my DVDs. Ripping them helps reduce the amount of storage I will require. MPEG2-PS files are compatible with my PS3 which is the client to my Mediatomb DLNA server.

As a solution to the above I created this script, which can extract the main feature from a DVD video, allowing the user to select one audio stream and one subtitle stream. Optionally the video can be requantised, using M2VRequantiser, and an ISO image created. If creating an ISO image the chapters are also preserved from the original DVD.

• See the Code section of my site for the download and more details.

DVD-toMPG.sh was released on April 23rd 2009 to help celebrate St. George’s Day.