Tip of the Day: Rip DVDs With Thoggen

Thoggen is a DVD ripping application built in GTK, featuring a simple and easy-to-use interface and allowing the creation of Ogg Theora video files. That's the nice thing about Thoggen: it creates videos using a completely free video codec.

Thoggen can work with DVDs, but it also supports opening DVD ISO images or reading a DVD directory which contains the VIDEO_TS folder. Notice that for encrypted DVDs you may need libdvdcss2. To install this library on Debian you can use the debian-multimedia.org repositories, and on Ubuntu you can use the repositories provided by Medibuntu.

Select which titles you want to rip (each title will be placed in a separate output file)

The latest release of Thoggen is 0.7.1 and you can install it using:

- in Ubuntu, with your user password:

sudo apt-get install thoggen

- in Debian, with root password:

su
apt-get install thoggen

Thoggen will allow you to select the size of the desired output file or its video bitrate, you can edit the Title and Comment tags and will also allow to resize the video. Very simple but efficient. It doesn't support subtitles though, so if you need a more powerful ripper, use dvd::rip (or K9Copy in KDE).

Available settings for the output file

Ripping can take a while