QuickRip needs you, you need QuickRip

QuickRip (screenshots) is a DVD backup utility for GNU/Linux, with a Qt interface as well as a command line interface. It makes ripping DVDs onto your hard drive quick and easy, and so is ideal for those who aren't bothered about framerates, clipping, and other (usually) unnecessary options. Version 0.7 has just been released, bringing the basic list of features close to completion, but we'd like to see more feature requests, bug reports (or less!) and code submissions before we hit the 1.0 milestone to make QuickRip the best DVD backup utility for KDE.

QuickRip is the only DVD backup utility to use the Qt toolkit, as well as offering a command line interface, with full KDE and Gtk/GNOME interfaces in the works. It is unique in this approach, as well as its focus on ease of use. Other notable features include:

  • The choice of one-pass, two-pass and three-pass encoding processes, to choose between speed and quality;
  • The usual options for changing filesizes, languages (audio & subtitle), aspect ratios, dealing with interlaced DVDs, etc.;
  • A special PDA mode that makes video files suitable to be viewed on a PDA screen

We'd like to hear users' views on what makes QuickRip good, and what they'd like to see in future releases. We'd also like to get a few more developers on board, to make the code even better, add requested features, and add features of their own. If you'd like to help out, visit the SourceForge project page and post in the forums, submit feature requests, submit bugs, and help us reach 1.0 to give KDE a really decent DVD backup program.

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Comments

by Anonymous (not verified)

Please add clipping! I do not care about fps settings or other advanced features, but clipping dramatically improves the movie quality.

(Or add automatic clipping using mplayer -vop cropdetect).

by Tom Chance (not verified)

I've just changed the code to use cropdetect to detect appropriate cropping attributes, and to then use those to crop the film :)

You can get the new code by fetching dvd.py from CVS, then overwriting the existing dvd.py with the new one (found in /usr/share/quickrip).

Grab from CVS with your CVS client, or from the web at:
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/quickrip/quickrip/dvd.py

Though the web-based CVS viewer seems to be playing up at the moment, so you might have to wait a while for it to update the new version.

by JLP (not verified)

Does this support encoding video into XviD format and audio into 5.1 Ogg Vorbis format?

by Tom Chance (not verified)

Both are planned features. If you go to the site and submit a feature request we might be more resolved to implement them ;)

by Tom Chance (not verified)

Ooops, ignore me, I've just noticed that you already have :-)

by Mike (not verified)

It would be grea if DVD burning functionality could be integrated into K3b, is tehre such a plan?

Anyway, looks like a good program.

by Sebastian Trueg (not verified)

DVD writing with dvdrecord is almost finished here (needs some testing, I don't habe a DVD-Writer yet.). DVD+RW writing and video-dvd to follow... :)

Cheers,
Sebastian

by Datschge (not verified)

...including it in KDE Extragear? http://extragear.kde.org/

by lrandall (not verified)

Yeah I think that's a great idea...

by Scott Wheeler (not verified)

Well, typically to be put in the KDE CVS repository it should actually be a KDE application, not just a Qt application. While I did give it a whirl and it's a reasonably nice app for DVD ripping, it doesn't use standard KDE dialogs or menus, doesn't have a DCOP interface, etc. Note that this doesn't make it a bad app, it just means that it's not a KDE app and as such really (in my opinion) doesn't belong in the CVS repository.

by Datschge (not verified)

Well, Tom Chance did write in the text at the top of this page (aka "article") that QuickRip currently is only command line and a Qt interface but that he's working on a "full KDE interface" which implies that everything you mentioned will be included (I sure hope so). ;)

by lrandall (not verified)

I must confess I said that it would be a good idea to add this to cvs based on the function the program performs. I hadn't actually checked whether the program was a KDE app, I just assumed it was. However, if the program was modified to use KDE dialogs, toolbars etc, I think having an app like this in kdemultimedia would be really great...

QuickRip looks nice if all you want is a simple ripper/encoder. For those who would like more control and functionality, I suggest you take a look at dvd::rip.

Yama
PCLinuxOnline.com

by Anonymous (not verified)

Why are all these programs written in Python and Perl? I don't like having to struggle around with (snapshots of) language bindings.

by Tom Chance (not verified)

I obviously can't speak for dvd::rip, but for QuickRip, I used Python for several reasons:

o I don't know C/C++ ;-)
o It makes coding much faster and easier
o It makes the program less bug prone, and makes fixing bugs eaiser for the clued-up end user
o It's not the sort of app that suffers from the very slight speed loss

As for having to use snapshots, you only need to if you use a distro which made the awful mistake of shipping incompatable versionf of Qt, KDE and PyQt.

If you're a C++ hacker, you could always do a C++ rewrite of any of the apps. Making one from python is particularly easy as it's just a matter of translating the code, since the structure is almost identical.

i have coded both C++ qt programs and pyqt qt programs, and i really like pyqt.
on most distributions pyqt is difficult to install tho, its a pity. on debian
you can do apt-get install python2.2-qt3 i believe.

pyqt is really nice, no more waiting for compile and no more weird C++ runtime
and compiletime errors. it does really matter for smaller applications, but
it is a bit slower especially on application startup ..

its splendid for fast prototyping: you have a working prototype in no time.
when the app gets bigger, python's dynamic typing can bite you, but then you
can switch to c++ if you want (i believe scribus was started as a pyqt project
and converted to c++ later)

emerge PyQt... ;-)

by Simon Edwards (not verified)

Then encourage your distro to make PyQt and PyKDE a priority. Personally, I'm busting for PyKDE to become better supported so that I can ditch C++ for most of my stuff. It's just amazing how fast (and fun!) things can be done with Python and Qt/KDE...

--
Simon

by Tom Chance (not verified)

And (in the spirit of opensource ;-) people might also want to check out Acidrip (http://acidrip.sourceforge.net). It lies somewhere in between QuickRip and dvd::rip in terms of difficulty & power, and works very well for me.

by Lee (not verified)

sounds great. Where are the debs for ppc? (hint, hint ;)

by Lee (not verified)

hmmm... it's probably not so easy to pull off, but what would be REALLY cool is a network-ripping feature. You know: where the app will maybe copy the raw data to hd, and then talk to other instances of quickrip on the lan, sending them all chapters to work on or something, so that they can co-operate to get the rip done quickly. I'd even settle for something that only worked on a shared filesystem :)

Apart from that, I'd want really good priority management (haven't tried it yet; no time this morning) so that I can run it without it bugging me, and maybe some basic and/or smart scheduling system so it can work when I'm not using my machine.

by ik (not verified)

you mean like dvd::rip in cluster mode ..
well, i tought one of the objectives of quickrip was to be simple, so maybe
this will not be an ambition

by Lee (not verified)

hmm... I guess that makes sense. A simplicity is definitely top of my priority list for a dvd ripper. Perhaps someday, it'll be easy to use apple's opensourced rendezvous or something to to it automatically, though ;D

by JohnFlux (not verified)

What they could do is simply break up the work over multiple processes. This will allow it to take advantage of SMP machines, and openmosix can distribute it over many machines.

by Anonymous (not verified)

Will it be possible tu easily rip these CDs with the old animes we used to watch as kids ? they have several episodes on one DVD, which are not always on different tracks (some are all on one track, and you have to see the chapters to choose which episode you want to watch)