HandBrake

Is there any advantages to ripping the dvd to hdd prior to using handbrake? I've read several postings that suggest to pre-rip the dvd to hdd first for speed purposes and also to handle the css encoding before handbrake has a shot at it. I've been using handbrake for a awhile now (not pre-ripping) and have not experienced any problems with css, sure some more speed would be nice though.
If I should rip movies to hdd first, would be a good option?

The main advantage to preripping is to remove protection above and beyond simple CSS, which vobcopy will not do. I'm actually unaware of any Unix/Linux-based tools capable of it.

Rodney

There are a couple reasons I can think of to pre-rip. It's faster to rip than it is to encode. So pre-ripping a collection of discs and adding them to the queue to run overnight can be more efficient use of your time. And as rhester says, it is sometimes necessary to remove protection methods that go beyond CSS. There aren't any traditional rippers for linux that can do this, but mplayer can be used to dump a single title if its been compiled with dvdnav support. In my experience, pre-ripping only has a marginal cumulative speed benefit.

Thanks for your responses. I run handbrake cli on my file server so a marginal speed increase really wouldn't help me that much as it's not tying up my wife's or my laptop. I was hoping for something more then marginal, but it is what it is.
Happy New Year,
Kolbi

For 99 pct of the stuff I do (which is a lot, we are couch potatoes from the word go so have worked hard to make the couch experience a cool one) straight linux normal Handbrake rip works great. However for certain DVDs (damaged, protected, etc) then I load up a VirtualBox image of XP with AnyDVD installed (and literally nothing else). I then use AnyDVD to rip the image to a shared folder accessible from Linux and send HandBrake after that image. AnyDVD is nice enough, wish they had a Linux version but glad it exists in any form. If anything ever stops it, I just wait a few days and presto, problem gone. Would that all of life's problems work out this way

It is a little faster at the rip but since for me the rip speed is largely driven by the encoding process and hardware available. As such, having another processor to throw at it will yield better rip speeds that ripping from an image vs a physical disc.

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