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I'm trying to use the cmd-line FFMPEG pgm, to rip a movie-DVD into either a MP4 or MKV container, on Windows-OS. (Please do NOT tell me to use some other GUI-based pgm, as so many of the other articles do.)

The part of the ffmpeg command that I can't determine, is just what syntax to use to reference the DVD-drive as the input. (I've looked in the FFMPEG documentation, but I can't see the forest for the trees.)

[Edit:]So I did some more google-searches and found an article on using VLC for this task. Since I already had VLC installed, this approach seemed worth trying. That article is here: https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/2696/how-to-rip-dvds-with-vlc/ (Stay tuned for further updates on my progress.)

David
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Yes, VLC is the right tool. Following that article's recipe, it did produce a single .MP4 file, as desired! (Initially, I was confused about the need to specify and open a file-based target, before the 'Start' button would become armed. It finally dawned on me to specify a DIRECTORY rather than a file...then I could click the 'Start' button. VLC ran for over an hour, doing the conversion.)

An additional part of my task was to then do the reverse operation...i.e. to then burn the resulting .MP4 file onto a new blank DVD. I assumed VLC could do that job for me, but no. My google-searches led me to this https://superuser.com/questions/890272/create-dvd-from-mp4-using-ffmpeg

It turns out that another (free) tool called DVDStyler was the solution, as mentioned in the 'superuser' thread above. DVDStyler seems quite complex, but I managed to struggle though it, and got it to burn a DVD equivalent to the DVD that I started with.

I hope this answer helps the next person who needs to rip or burn a video-DVD. Cheers...

David
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