On the other hand I didn't have faster internet connection, so my options were really limited. So I went for the obvious ... MPlayer which is easy to setup and takes little space. Unlike many other player in GNU/Linux, MPlayer is one of the oldest and the most powerful. It's not just a player but even comes with a built in encoder called Mencoder.
But the sad thing about Mencoder is that it's a command-line app. But to be honest if you only have a decent knowledge about DVDRipping (like me :D) even then, you'll be amazed by its capabilities. From Video cropping to resizing, adding several enhancers... oh you name it.
I always wondered how great it will be if there is a decent GUI written in GTK or Qt (for KDE geeks) for Mencoder which should enable the GUI itself to easily become one of the most popular ones within the GNU/Linux community thanks to the power of Mencoder.
I'm pretty sure there are dozens of 'em but Acidrip is bloody amazing!. So let me give you guys few of its...
Main features..
*. Load a DVD directly or load a copy of it from your HDD.
*. Calculate your final file size (700MB, etc and bitrates of audio and videos will be automatically adjusted, can manually override of course).
*. Auto detect crop or manually change values, resize video resolutions.
*. Select chapters.
*. Add post and pre video filters to enhance the quality of your Rip.
*. Change audio/video bitrate, use a different codecs (xvid/lavc, etc) and other advanced codec values (some video related settings such as optimizing the rip for a cartoon or changing audio bitrate related options, audio gain which is very useful for some DVD audio tracks, etc).
*. Video previewing (including cropping values, etc).
*. Single pass or two pass (or more, seriously, two pass is more than enough :P) encoding.
*. Remove/Add or extract subtitles to separate file.
*. Queue support... few of the main features.
But Acidrip lacks a small thing. It's actually not that it doesn't have it... it do but unless you know about it... I don't think a newbie will know how to use it. For instance, the more lower the video bitrate that you trying to go for the lower the quality of the DVDrip will be.
In those cases we can use several built in filters in Mencoder which are generally known as post-processing filters. Although you can insert them in Acidrip but unless you know the command (text lines) that activates these post-processing effects (which are very effective, sometimes), most won't be using them.
So lets hope the cool Acidrip developers would let the users add these post-processing effects with ease in the future releases.
Anyhow, in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, 10.10 or 10.04 you can install Acidrip (0.14, current version) by using the below command in your GNU/Linux Terminal.
sudo apt-get install acidrip
That's it.
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