Okay, I asked on Stack Exchange, but I’ll ask here too …
In Mountain Lion, how do I rip only the audio from a DVD as losslessly as possible? I have several concert DVDs that I would like to listen to on my iPod. I have an extensive music library1, which is mostly ripped from my own CDs in Apple Lossless format, so my best-case scenario is getting lossless audio off of the DVDs and converting it to ALAC.
I realize that the audio tracks on DVDs might already be lossy if they’re in AC3 format, but PCM is lossless. If there is PCM audio on the DVD, then I want to rip that from the DVD and convert that to ALAC. If there is AC3 audio on the DVD, then I want to rip that from the DVD and pretend that I’m not annoyed by a lossy resampling in the conversion of AC3 (which I can’t listen to on any device that I own) to AAC (or something else).
I know that Handbrake is great for ripping video, but its FAQ says that it doesn’t do audio only. AudioHijackPro will record the audio, so that’s introducing an unnecessary layer of loss if the audio is PCM, and I’m not sure if resampling an AC3-to-AAC is less lossy than recording an AC3 track into MP3.
I’m willing to deal with a convoluted workflow to achieve my goal. I could also revert to Windows if necessary; I’ve got a Win7 VM readily available, and I have a Win2k8 server sitting under my desk for testing purposes.
- Currently around 40k tracks, and ever-growing; I purchased over 100 albums last year alone. ↩
Unfortunately I don’t have a DVD handy to test this out on, but ffmpeg should do the trick. The command line will look something like:
ffmpeg -i /Volumes/[dvd]/VIDEO_TS/[whatever].vob -map 0:2 -acodec alac extracted_audio.mp4
where the “map” argument will be determined by the stream that ffmpeg tells you the PCM audio is on in the DVD. ffmpeg can tell you that by just a “ffmpeg -i [path to vob]”.
ffmpeg can extract and transcode AC3 to AAC as well if you’d like to do that.
ffmpeg doesn’t come bundled with OS X by default, but Homebrew is an easy way to install it.
Unless there’s a hard disc space problem, the straightforward way to do it is to rip the DVD first and then extract the audio stream you want. (The video and audio are interleaved, so it’s not like you could read just the audio faster than you can read the whole thing.) Since FFmpeg works so well elsewhere, I’d assume FFmpeg for Mac can handle the extraction and (if needed) conversion of the audio stream from the ripped VOB files.
At least, that’s the workflow I’d use on Windows, because I know of a reliable, free tool that rips nearly all DVDs, while the drivers that try to bypass CSS transparently so you can treat a DVD like a normal disc seem to me to be more trouble than they’re worth.
If MAC can decrypt on the fly without problems, then you should be able to point FFmpeg straight at the VOB files on the DVD. It’s a command line tool, so it can take some reading and fussing to figure out what options you need for a particular task.
If you need to split into separate files by chapters (without manually doing surgery on one giant PCM file), I seem to recall doing that once successfully with VOBEdit, but it’s an ancient, Windows-only tool. There might be better ways now.
Finally (again, guessing from Windows experience), the folks at VideoHelp.com (Mac forum) are probably the ones who know all the answers.
Try Wiretap Studio? Set it to record Mac Audio. it’s a bit of a kludge, since if it’s 5.1, you lose that, but if you’re doing this for your iPod, “only” having stereo shouldn’t be an issue.
It’s shareware, so you can try it before you lay out $$$
Nah, the goal isn’t to record the audio, but rather to rip it. It’s to make it part of my music library, which is ripped losslessly (and converted to AAC for iPod use).