How to rip a dvd that is CSS protected

I was able to make a DVD bitwise copy with the command ddrescue --no-scrape /dev/scd0 output.iso from my cygwin bash command prompt, when the dd command would fail due to bad sectors as part of the DVD copy protection scheme.

The --no-scrape option may have caused the loss of an iframe at the beginning of one of the titles, but saved a lot of time in analysing the DVD.

I found that gem on the VLC website.

In case you want to have a 1:1 iso image of the DVD which can be played directly in some media player or mounted with the image mounter, you can just use Brasero after installing libdvdcss2. Choose the 1:1 copy and select an image file as target.

In general there are some DVD that have additional protections. In some cases it helps to try playing the DVD in different media players first.