Computer Audio Asylum: Ripping music from DVD/Bluray/HDDVD by Christine Tham

Now that I have finally finished ripping my CD collection (over 3000 titles), my DVD-Audios (around 70 titles), a good selection of my LPs, the next frontier is ripping music from concert videos.

The tools I recommend are:
- Slysoft AnyDVD (to enable audio to be extracted)
- eac3to (to actually do the extraction), or DVD Decrypter for DVDs
- Nero 7 (to do MLP/TrueHD, AC3, DTS conversion to WAV)
- Sony Sound Forge 10 (to do postprocessing and remastering)
- dbPoweramp (to convert to the format of your choice)
- mp3tag (to tag the final result)

All rips are bitperfect as the audio is interleaved into media containers on UDF filesystem rather than the problematic CDDA format.

You need a copy of Nero 7 with the Bluray/HDDVD plugin. Not sure if you can buy this anymore, I bought mine years ago. Later versions of Nero do not work with eac3to.

Lots of tutorials on how to do this, so I won't post step by step instructions.

But here are some pointers
- obviously your first preference is to rip high resolution PCM - TrueHD or Linear PCM is easily rippable, DTS Master Audio is more difficult (you need to also purchase ArcSoft TMT) - luckily I don't have any music video discs with DTS Master Audio.
- some titles have 24-bit LPCM tracks - however, be careful, these may not be correctly mastered - one HDDVD that I ripped from claims to have a 24-bit LPCM track but appears to be 16-bit (the lower order bits are zero)
- some LPCM tracks are heavily compressed - sometimes it's better to rip the front left/right channels from the DTS or AC3 track - generally 5.1 mixes tend to be less compressed than 2.0.
- if you do rip from 5.1, analyse the 5.1 track on Sound Forge to see whether you should downmix or not. Most of the time the Front Left/Right channels are full range and contain a good stereo mix - you don't need to mix in the centre channel or the LFE track - this is preferable to avoid phase cancellation. If in doubt, experiment and see what sounds better.
- DTS quality is not as good as lossless, but acceptable - generally sounds heavier and muddier than lossless
- AC3 is barely acceptable, generally sounds thinner and muffled compared to lossless. Don't bother if the bitrate is less than 320 kbps, you won't like the result. 448 kbps is near lossless and quite acceptable if you are transcoding to mp3 (which I generally do since the goal is listening to the music when I'm out and about).
- there are always exceptions - some LPCM tracks are so badly mastered that I ended up preferring the AC3 version - they look absolutely butchered on Sound Forge (compressed to the max, then attenuated to -6dB to comply with broadcasting standards).
- 24-bit is no guarantee of quality - James Taylor live at Beacon Theater for example has a 24-bit LPCM track but it is highly compressed, James Taylor Pullover only has a 16-bit LPCM track but the audio is not compressed as much.
- amongst the rubbish are some true gems - a good rip from a concert video is better than CD quality (48/24). Chris Botti Live has a 96/24 lossless audio track that is well worth listening to. A lot of opera DVDs have excellent audio tracks.