Actual Reality

Disclaimer:
The use of the libdvdcss library (included in 0SEx) is controversial in some countries such as the US due to DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). This article is not intended in any way to promote piracy or illegal sharing of DVD videos.

0SEx is an awesome, completely free Mac application for ripping DVDs, with a lot of functionality, buried under a somewhat cryptic interface. One of the features it provides is the ability to rip just the audio of a DVD, as well as the ability to choose only part of the DVD to rip. This makes it a great tool for ripping the music from concert or opera DVDs, or just ripping the audio from your favorite movies so you can listen to them on your iPod or in your car’s CD player.

Using 0SEx to Rip the DVD’s Audio Files

To get started download 0SEx and copy it over to your Applications folder. Now pop in a DVD and fire up 0SEx. You’ll be presented with the main window:

The 0SEx main window in all its glory

First off, click on the Fmt button and select “Elem. Streams”. Under Seg, choose “Chapter”. This will break the audio up into bite-sized pieces, perfect for making an audio CD.

Now let’s look at the three buttons in the row above: Vid, Aud, and Sub. Since we only want to rip the audio, uncheck any video streams under Vid. Choose the desired audio streams you want to rip under Aud. Usually you’ll want to choose 2 Ch streams, rather than 5 or 6 Ch streams. Uncheck everything under Sub.

Selecting audio streams - hint: you probably don't want the 6CH or foreign language streams.

Before we start ripping, we need to choose which parts of the DVD to rip using the Ti (Title) and Ch (Chapter) buttons. If you’re not sure which title(s) and chapter(s) you want to rip, open up DVD Player and use the Go menu to select each title and/or chapter to see if its the one you want. Now, choose the desired title(s) in 0SEx using the Ti button, and choose the desired chapter(s) using the Ch button.

We’re ready to get started now. Click on BEGIN to start ripping the DVD. A progress bar indicates how much of the DVD has been ripped.

Ripping some audio from "The Manchurian Candidate"

Converting the ac3 file to mp3 using ffmpegX

When the rip is finished, you can listen to the resulting ac3 files using a media player like VLC. However, you’ll probably want to convert them into a more common format such as mp3. To do this, we can use another handy app: ffmpegX. Follow the instructions on the ffmpegX Download page to install it, then fire it up. Drag and drop an ac3 file onto the text “Drop file here”, or alternately select the file using the Open button. Under Target format, click the arrow next to “To” and choose “Audio file to mp3″ (second option from the bottom). If you want to fine tune the mp3 quality options, choose the Audio tab to reveal the mp3 encoding options. When you’re done, hit Encode to start encoding the mp3 file.

Using ffmpegX to convert an ac3 file to mp3

Trimming the mp3

One last thing you might want to do is trim the mp3 down to remove any gaps or extraneous parts. AudioSlicer is a free app that does just that. With it, you can split the mp3 into multiple slices, remove parts you don’t want, all without any loss of quality to the mp3. You could also use QuickTime Pro or MP3 Trimmer to do the same thing, although both of those cost money.

Using AudioSlicer to split an mp3 file into separate pieces

Summary

The Mac has some great free applications available for DVD ripping and encoding. The programs mentioned above–0SEx, ffmpegX, and AudioSlicer–are all very powerful and contain many more features than discussed here. For example, you could easily use 0SEx to rip a DVD and then encode it to a DivX or H.264 video using ffmpegX. Or you could compress a DVD9 to DVD5 so that you could make a backup copy on a DVD-R. The possibilities are virtually endless.

If you’re interested in any additional guides to using 0SEx, ffmpegX, AudioSlicer, or other free Mac apps, let me know in the Comment section below.