Ripping DVD audio to MP3

A short guide on how to rip DVD audio into MP3s with mplayer.

I saw Dream Theater’s Live at Budokan DVD at our local supermarket and somehow it just found its way into our basket. I’d been thinking of getting it at some point, but seeing it and feeling it beckon, I was unable to resist.

A good concert, something I’d wish to have been able to see live myself. Especially the Instrumedley they played was something that just said coding music as well. So, instead of going out and looking for the CDs of the concert (which probably can’t be found anywhere near here), I decided to rip the audio off the DVD into an MP3-file. And yes, this is all perfectly legal as I’m making a copy for my own personal use of content I have bought.

I used Mplayer on Linux (Fedora Core 3) to do this, but the same commands should be applicable elsewhere as Mplayer is available on several other platforms. In this case we are talking about chapter 9 of the first title (title 1). The first step is to encode the audio of the chapter into a file.

mencoder dvd://1 -chapter 9-9 -oac mp3lame -ovc frameno -o instrumedely.avi

Remember, the -chapter parameter takes a range as its value. If you specify only one number (e.g. 9) it assume that it’s the beginning of the range and the end of the range is the end of the disc.

Now you have an AVI file in which there isn’t any video and the audio is MP3 encoded. The next step is to extract just the audio into a separate file.

mplayer instrumedley.avi -dumpaudio -dumpfile Instrumedley.mp3

Now you have a MP3 file. I recommend setting the ID3 tags, easyTAG is fairly easy to use for the task.

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