How to capture audio from DVDs?

Tips & Tricks
#1

I want to record sounds from movies to use them in my music. I have a big collection of DVDs that are sitting on dusty shelves in my room as well as a HD with a number of movies (mostly .avi and .mkv) that I plan to go through.

The issue I’m facing right now is to have a reliable method of capturing the sounds with best possible quality. I’d prefer freeware that doesn’t prompt me to install 20 of their toolbars… so no shady programs and the likes. Asking Google revealed that VLC media player is able to convert and save incoming audio from videos as WAV/mp3. After some testing and tweaking I’ve come to the conclusion that VLC is great to capture audio from any video file (I successfully converted audio from AVI, MKV and WEBM, but I guess other file types should work just as fine). Here is a small tutorial if anyone is interested: https://www.vlchelp.com/convert-audio-format/

Attempting to record audio from DVDs however gives me bad results. No matter how much I re-record and tweak the settings, VLC always gives me a faulty WAV file that can’t be opened and which seems to be corrupted (6 KB file size). Now you could say that mp3 320 kb/s would be just as good, but let me tell you that after changing the initial mp3 settings (which is 128 kb/s = no go) VLC is going full retard and only offers to save the recording in a .TS/PS container which doesn’t do anything at all. Manually written mp3 extensions don’t do the trick either.

So does anyone know what the hell I am doing wrong or why VLC can’t deal with higher bitrate capturing? I’d be happy if someone knows of any alternative that doesn’t suck. I could go ahead and save samples in 128 mp3 but I would really prefer to keep it consistent with the rest of my sample library which is all WAV.

#2

If I had to extract short sample material from movie files without loss of quality, I think I’d simply record the audio flow coming from the soundcard. If you’re on Windows and your soundcard doesn’t provide such a function natively, you can use WASAPI loopback recording in combination with, for instance, Audacity. Hope this helps.

#3

If you have a handheld recorder you can connect it directly to your DVD player. It won’t be completely lossless, but near enough.

#4

If I had to extract short sample material from movie files without loss of quality, I think I’d simply record the audio flow coming from the soundcard. If you’re on Windows and your soundcard doesn’t provide such a function natively, you can use WASAPI loopback recording in combination with, for instance, Audacity. Hope this helps.

This is what I do and it works like a charm. Recommended.

#5

for capturing audio when using asio4all I recommend:

HIFI-CABLE & ASIO-Bridge from this site:

http://vb-audio.pagesperso-orange.fr/Cable/index.htm

after installing it you can set system capture audio as asio input in renoise and just record

low latency + work-flow speedup = win win

#6

Have you made sure you are selecting the right title track in vlc?

#7

If I had to extract short sample material from movie files without loss of quality, I think I’d simply record the audio flow coming from the soundcard. If you’re on Windows and your soundcard doesn’t provide such a function natively, you can use WASAPI loopback recording in combination with, for instance, Audacity. Hope this helps.

Thanks for the heads up. I wasn’t aware Audacity can do this. Will get this program as soon as possible.

Have you made sure you are selecting the right title track in vlc?

Yeah I have. I figured that out very quickly. Recording to 128 mp3 is working like a charm, but changing settings to higher bitrates will mess with the settings and VLC starts using PS/PL container for no reason. WAV recordings are bugged as well (as mentioned before).

#8

theres a few different ways to do the same thing in vlc (as you have probably noticed :slight_smile: ) e.g there is convert/save or stream in the media menu entry…or you could add the title track to the playlist and then right click the playlist item and select stream or save…maybe you might get better results that way… what about creating your own encapsulation preset and not utilising one of the built in ones…and maybe you should go into vlc’s preferences and reset them to default values…iv had to do that MANY times after fucking around with shit…strange as ripping to a wav here is working…

#9

what about creating your own encapsulation preset and not utilising one of the built in ones…and maybe you should go into vlc’s preferences and reset them to default values…iv had to do that MANY times after fucking around with shit…strange as ripping to a wav here is working…

Just to avoid any misunderstanding… are we still talking about recording from DVD to WAV? Like I said before, capturing from AVI/MKV/WEBM to WAV and from DVD to 128 MP3 is working flawlessly but I just cant seem to get a lossless recording done and if it’s working for you I would love to know how you approach this step by step?

I’ve messed with the encapsulation and file extension settings, I’ve done several attempts with different settings each time to avoid any errors I might have done before just to reset everything later and try again… all to no avail. VLC is a good program and I like the Converting feature, I just wish it would be more straight forward and comprehensible about it’s encoding settings. For instance you can type the bitrate of the mp3 audio layer manually by any random number you wish (even above 320 but not up to 1411 kb/s which would be the standard for WAV) instead of being able to select CBR/VBR and their correspondent bitrate values. I mean this must be a joke, right? How am I able to create my own encoding profile if I even can’t set the appropriate values for a WAV file?

#10

Maybe you can try to record to wav in VLC? :o

Haha, only joking. :stuck_out_tongue:

Have you tried VirtualDub? I haven’t used it for this purpose myself, but i think it should handle it.

#11

doing it this way works for me…right click the playlist window > advanced open > select disk & title menu & chapter (check no disk menu too) then hit select > press stop playback if it starts playing > right click the playlst entry and hit save > create new profile > select WAV for encapsulation > leave video enc. turned off > turn audio encoding on & select audio codec to wav & change samplerate > name the profie (i used wav) > hit create > select this profile in the dropdown menu > then select browse and choose where to save it too and give the file a name but leave off the filetype (it should add the wav itself) > hit start…

as a further note it is possible to select vbr mode for mp3 bt the setting is hidden away in the preferences under audio codec > twolame…

#12

Here is an online converter that converts VOB files to WAV, i guess it should do the job:http://www.zamzar.com/convert/vob-to-wav/

Edit: taking a closer look at virtualdub i don’t think it’s able to export audio, only video.

#13

I think ffmpeg/avconv can convert from directly ripped vob data (with whatever program you’re using to fill your hdd this way) to wav/flac, also with timecodes. From the command line shell, so you better feel a bit like a nerd while doing it. Linux freaks know these tools well, but I think there’s builds for win and mac also.

Direct DVD audio might be nice quality, but keep in mind for such experiments…that it might already be stored in lossy compression (like mp2 or shit, ffmpeg can tell you what’s inside a vob), and movie samples are most probably already fucked up by movie style mixdown and background noises/ambience, so it’s questionable whether you really need the best possible quality rips for the usual movie-sample-in-electronic-music-purposes.

#14

Avidemux will let you extract audio from DVDs.

http://filmora.wondershare.com/video-editor/free-video-editor-avidemux.html

Extract Audio with Avidemux. Extract Video: In the left Audio panel, select the output audio format, and then go to Audio/Save… to extract audio from your loaded video.

#15

Just use a software that can extract the audio stream of a video file or DVD. Or a good audio editor which is able to load videos for further audio processing. I’m using Sound Forge and it can extract Audio from Videos. Or You need a Soundcard which has a good software mixer, where you can route your signals from WDM out to ASIO in (i think the ASIO4All can also do that) and record it in Renoise with the sampler.

#16

You’re trying to use the extracted audio for music production. You will want to maintain best possible quality because of this. I mean, you should imho.

So you will want to use a path with the least amount of lossy encoding involved. I’d go for straigth ripping the 1:1 data from the dvd in the original compression formats (minus the worthless copy protection, thx jon), then convert to lossless .wav or .flac from there with the best quality decoder you can get your hands on. The resulting lossless files can then be cut and used in the music production software. Don’t whine that would be too many steps or too complicated, just get some nerd to make you a script you can just start with a single click after putting the dvd in drive & have the audio ready to cut in a folder of your chouce…after a cup of coffee.

Note you will still have the lossyness and artefacts of the original dvd compression codec used to author the dvd, this cannot be circumvented. But at least you won’t add your own degradation to the sound this way. Yes, degradation will accumulate, try to convert some tune with medium quality settings in a circle around 2-4 different lossy formats…after x steps the glitches will become very audibly apparent…these glitches are added by each lossy compression, though at the first steps they are most often not directly audible/noticeable. They will also pop up to the front if you do a lot of processing on the sound that involves boosting (distortions…), and this can ruin your sound.

#18

The article may be helpful: Solved: How Can You Facilely Rip Audio from DVD

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