Convert DVD to MKV (et al) without transcoding/recompression

Like a lot of people, I have a lot of DVDs. But we also have a stupid amount of disk space and a media centre (Boxee) so the DVDs are getting less and less use. It would be nice to convert our DVDs into something more relevant to our needs.

I've dabbled with DVD ripping before but whereas I'd usually transcode down to a smaller picture size with a better video compression algorithm, this takes a silly amount of time. I don't have a couple of hours available for each disk. (Sidebar: is there dedicated, Linux-friendly hardware to improve h264 encoding performance?)

So I was wondering if there's anything that take the DVD filesystem, De-CSS it, and then stitch together any the VOBs that make up the main part of the film and package that up in a wrapping format like MKV. A bonus would be if it could grab the subtitles and stick them in too but that's not a requirement as Boxee can grab the subtitles online if it needs to.

Solution 1:

I tried mkvtoolnix and it did it instantly, maybe because of copy-on-write feature of Btrfs I use.

Solution 2:

MakeMKV seems to be working for me.

http://www.makemkv.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=224

Just extracts the non-trivial sized titles from a DVD, puts them un-transcoded in an MKV file. Includes default audio track and the subtitles tracks.

Also does blu-ray apparently (I don't have a drive)

Handbrake doesn't do what you're asking for but it's the best I've found so far for making painless, compressed copied of titles on commercial DVDs

http://handytutorial.com/install-handbrake-in-ubuntu-12-10-quantal/

That guides for 12.10, but it works just fine for 12.04 as well. The bit that had me stumped was the package is called handbrake-gtk, not handbrake.

My first attempt with handbrake has compressed 40 minute extras video from a DVD from 1.3GB to 0.3 GB at > 100fps on my PC of, at this point, fairly obsolete power.

However the loss in quality was noticeable to my overly critical eye, but you can bump the quality easily by decreasing the quality slider by small amounts.