When I started this page in March 2000 I had no idea that it would turn into something big. When I started out ripping my first DVD there was no single good guide available on the web and I had to figure it out all on my own. I spent a lot of time browsing Delphi Forums trying to get details on how titles like "The Matrix", how to get proper synch, etc. In the end I decided to make the results available to everyone. Till then much has changed. This page now more than 400 HTML pages, more than 2000 images and a considerable software archive and it's getting more and more. Moreover you can get your daily dose of ripping-related news. Keeping this all together takes an insane amount of time.

Therefore I'd appreciate it that if you find out something that this site does not cover if you contacted me and let me know so I can incorporate it into my site. Also.. if you've come across a problem that you've been able to solve on your own let me know in any case.. maybe I didn't know that particular problem before and it might be of interest to other people.

Furthermore I'd appreciate it that you note these basic rules: The guides are there as a whole and some guides are based on others. If you prefer somebody else's method that's fine with me but for instance my advanced guides may not be compatible with other site's basic methods. Therefore it's important that if you read a guide that goes beyond basic ripping that you're aware of the details of my basic guide - like how to use your favorite ripping program, encoder, what settings are required, etc. For instance if you want multiple audio tracks don't expect the guide on multiple audio tracks to explain you how to get these audio tracks... getting audio is described in the basic guides.
Also.. make sure you are aware of all the information available on this site regarding a certain subject before contacting me with a problem report. If there's something that I don't like at all it's replying to a question that has been dealt with in a guide or the FAQ. I know there's tons of information but I try to channel it in a useful way. The basic guides have links to all the information you may need... hence gain: it's important that you know the basics... and other guides may not cover all the information you may need.

And last but not least: Please tell everyone that may be interested in one of the subjects covered on this site about it. There's just one thing that counts for me: Your support. As long as people come to this site I'll continue to work on it.

About Doom9

First of all: Why the funny name? A long time ago (at least in the PC biz) ID Software released one of the world's most successful computer games: Doom. At that time I was still playing adventure games on my PC and I had no idea about 3d games. Only about 2 month later a friend of mine gave me Wolfenstein 3D to try out and I instantly fell in love with that type of games. When I had shot my way through the legions of enemies I read about Doom in a computer mag, and I even got a then special release of my favorite game mag which contained a title CD and had Doom on it. A week later I had finished the shareware version and was ready for the full release. After having beaten any mode except for Nightmare I got a couple of add-on CDs and I spent literally hundreds of hours playing Doom in one way or the other.

Then when I discovered the Internet, and more importantly, the IRC and it came to choosing a nickname the choice was clear for me. As Doom turned out to be my destiny as a gamer - I still played Star Wars games but not much else - it was the appropriate choice. The only thing was that Doom seemed a popular name so I often had to switch to Doom as "my" nick was already taken.

In September 98 I got my first DVD player and the first bunch of DVD discs (I bought 7 on one day..). Even before that I was looking forward to DVD when it was mentioned for the first time on a computer magazine. It was at the time when I started to get interested in English books and movies and would no longer accept the dubbed version and I spent a lot of money on English films. DVD allowed me to get my favorite films in English at a cheaper price than the imported VHS tapes. Furthermore all the extras on DVDs we love and the much better quality - and let's not forget not having to rewind anymore - was enough for me to instantly fall in love with the format and to buy a player at the official European launch date. At that time regionfree was not so common and so my first player only played R2 discs. Gradually I got annoyed to not be able to watch all the discs I wanted and so I got a regionfree player. Even before that I was watching R1 DVDs on my PC but the small screen simply killed the fun.

Being a regular on Oleg's site even at that date - mainly to get the latest software DVD player - I got interested in DVD ripping but all my tries to create a VCD out of a DVD failed miserably. I wasn't even able to encode more than one single frame off a DVD. In September 99 I read on inmatrix.com that the CSS scrambling had been cracked and that a program called Speed Ripper from DOD allowed you to copy DVDs to your harddrive. After searching the web for quite a while I finally found what I was looking for and along with it I had a respectable collection of VOB tools on my harddrive. The very first movie that made its way to my harddrive was Cruel Intentions that I just got a few days ago. But that was only the first step. I was still unable to make something useful out of these VOBs.

Only in December of the same year I discovered mpeg2avi and I managed to encode Enemy of the State into the DivX format. But I still didn't know about streamlists and so I got asynch video and nasty green frames at the cut positions and once again I gave up, even though I had bought a larger harddisk to be able to rip since my previous 6GB disc was just too small.

But since that date I've been reading Oleg's forum almost daily in order to learn more and more and two months later I decided to give it a shot again. This time, equipped with FlaskMpeg 0.5 and Nicky Page's first guide I managed to convert The Mummy in one go with audio and the whole thing was synch. Then I tried The Matrix and I failed miserably again because of the multiangles. I also tried a lot of other movies in both FlaskMpeg and mpeg2avi - I had learned about streamlists in the meantime - and all NTSC movies would turn out asynch whereas all PAL movies done in FlaskMpeg would be choppy, or be asynch if I was doing the audio decoding with ac3dec. So once again I put my plans on hold and read Oleg's forum and I collected every bit of info on The Matrix and 2 weeks later I managed my first successful Matrix rip after having splitted the VOBs using vStrip.

In the meantime I felt ready to participate in the discussions on Oleg's forum since I had already learned quite a bit. As you can see.... I hesitated to post because I remembered the old Netiquette.. that is in a newsgroup you first wait and read for a while to learn the general tone and stuff. That's why I get so frustrated when people, instead of reading FAQs and follow discussions, simply post stuff that has been answered a 100 times over. In any case.. in order to be able to post I had to sign up at delphi.com and my favorite old-time nick Doom was taken. Delphi suggested a few others, among them Doom9. Assuming that it would be exotic enough I went for it.

After my success with The Matrix I encoded a bunch of other titles and I soon learned the basics about manual synching and stuff. Then I decided, that since the guides out there weren't really good and wouldn't deal with all the problems that I ran across during my first step, I would write a small guide on my own and publish it on the web. In order to have an easy address I opened a go.to account and used the same name for it: Doom9. That was the birth date of go.to/doom9 and my site, on the 15th of March this year. About a month later a friend of mine suggested that I should change my guides into the HTML format which I then did, and I started adding screenshots.

The rest you can reconstruct on your own by looking at the old news. The growth rate has been incredible and what was initially one 2 page word document is now a full fledged website with several mirrors and a rather professional design - at least I hope so.

My preferred encoding method

Since I first wrote this document, so much has changed both in the ripping world, as well as in my personal life, that there really is no longer any method that I'd call my favorite. For starters, initially there was just DivX covered on my site, then VCD, SVCD and DVD were added. Today there's a bunch of MPEG-4 codecs, and a lot of ways to make a DVD. If you care about non MPEG-1/2 encoders, refer to the codec comparisons to get an impression of which codecs deliver good results. For MPEG-2 compression, CCE blows away anything in the progressive area, but it has its price point, and libavcodec based MPEG-2 encoders like QuEnc also deliver good quality at a price point you cannot beat (it's free;).

I think the available guides also reflect my preferences somewhat: I use Gordian Knot for every VfW codec (as far as GKnot allows it.. it doesn't support encoding in more than 4 codecs), and when it comes to rebuilding DVDs in high quality, it's either the Big3 (DoItFast4U and Co) or DVD Rebuilder. For a simpler but often lower quality way, DVD Shrink comes to mind.

My hardware

AMD Athlon 64 3500+
Shuttle FN95 mainboard (part of the Shuttle SN95F5 barebone system)
2x512MB PC3200 Kingston HyperX DDR RAM CL2
HIS Excalibur Radeon 9600 XT
Western Digital WD250JD 250 GB SATA Harddisk
NEC ND3500A DVD writer
Philips 230W5B2 Display connected via DVI (23" 16:9 LCD screen)

Why am I running this site?

Ever since I first got in touch with the Web, I felt like that the Internet was a place where normal people can create something great. I never figured this would be it, but when journalists started knocking on my door just months after I started it, and when I started making good contacts with important software developers in this part of the computing world, I figured I actually had a shot. So even almost 5 years after the start, this site is operated by just myself, yet it attracts more people than I ever could dream of 5 years ago (and I hope it'll continue to grow).

Initially, I just wanted to share my ripping experiences with the world, but I was encouraged by many parties to expand and to create a place where people would come back to on a daily basis. Hence the (almost) daily news. Unfortunately, since I finished my studies, I can no longer afford to spend half of a regular business day tinkering with new tools, and even though I spend about 1-2 hours daily (lots of that is taking care of the forum), but I strive to still keep the guides up-to-date and I'm grateful for a few collaborators that here and then help me out.

There is another reason why I got started: I've been keeping tabs on what the movie industry is doing in the legal area, and I don't like it one bit. Laws like the DMCA are clearly aimed at taking rights away from the paying customer and give the movie studios complete control over their content. A long while ago, smart people decided that it's no good that movie studios control the distribution of their works (movie studios used to own the movie theaters at a point where movie theaters was the only way to watch a movie). Step by step, they're trying to get back at that situation (ban on decryption, DRM, etc.). I very much believe that we should never give in to the demands of a rich industry with lots of lobbyists, and thus my work here is part of my effort to ensure that our rights to use paid content in a manner that makes sense to the paying customer do not evaporate.

I know that not everybody appreciates this site and some might say that this is just a nice facade for piracy. But I strongly disagree. It's up to each and every visitor of this site what they do with the information contained therein. Piracy would not be more or less of a problem if this site wasn't there, but many people might not be able to execute their right of fair use if sites like this did not exist.

So basically my motives are 2-fold: First I like to be able to put something big together and on the other side I like to help people to execute their rights which the movie industry would like to take away. I own more than 400 DVDs and I will continue to buy them but I will not sit back and watch as they try to strip the copyright act of its most important part - the fair use clause. Copyright should help benefit society and not the personal accounts of some movie studio execs.

This document was last updated on February 17, 2005