It can be difficult to determine what title to choose for the main movie, when trying to rip or copy a DVD …
It becomes especially difficult when certain copy protection mechanisms screw with the table of contents, and applications like DVDFab and HandBrake suddenly show a lot of “movies” on the DVD (I’ve seen up to 99 titles appear like this). Obviously the DVD does not contain 99 movies, but selecting the wrong title will actually produce a screwed up rip. Parts of the movies are skipped or are not in the right place in the movie.
With a simple trick you can figure out what title to pick (covering Windows, MacOS X and Linux).
Picking the right DVD title
With “normal” DVD’s it’s relatively easy to decide which of the titles is the actual movie – Simply pick the one with the longest playback time. Sometimes though this can be difficult when a DVD contains multiple titles (TV Series for example), or when a crazy copy protection mechanism screws with the table of contents and makes it appears as if the DVD has multiple titles.
So how do you determine the right track? Simple … let your DVD playback software tell you …
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VideoLAN VLC
VLC, a free video playback program available for Windows, MacOS X, Linux and other Operating Systems, is probably the easiest and most flexible tool to use for this purpose. Download VLC from the VLC Homepage, install it, and start it.
Note : Most Linux distributions come with so called package managers like APT, or Software Centre (Ubuntu), which typically allow you to install VLC straight from their.
Next insert your DVD if you haven’t already.
MacOS X
In the main menu, with VLC being the active application, click “File” “Open Disc…” (or press COMMAND + D).
VLC MacOS X – Play Disc
A confirmation dialog will open showing the disc type VLC found (if you have only one DVD Rom drive – otherwise a file dialog will appear. In that case select the DVD drive on the left side).
VLC MacOS X – Open DVD
The DVD will now start playback, which typically starts with the menu of the DVD.
Select the movie you want to rip and start watching the movie.
From the main menu you can now determine what title is the real title you need for ripping – make sure the actual movie is playing!
Click “Playback” “Title“.
The title in the list with the checkmark in front of it is the active title you’re looking for – take note of the title number and playback time so you can find it back in HandBrake or whatever DVD ripping program you’re using and that’s all there is to it.
VLC MacOS X – What Title is playing
If you’d like to see more detail, visit Hunk’s article here.
Windows
In the “Media” menu of VLC, select “Open Disc…” (or press CTRL + D).
VLC Windows – Open Disc
Next select the type of disc you’re about to play (DVD), enter the drive letter (VLC will select the first DVD/CD Rom player – or use “Browse…“) and click “Play” to start playback.
VLC Windows – Select the Disc
From the usual DVD menu (if applicable) start the featured movie – before proceeding make sure the movie is actually playing.
Once the movie you’d like to rip is playing, select from the VLC menu “Playback” “Title“.
The title marked (see illustration below) is the title you’re looking for … write down title number and playback time of that title so you can find it later in HandBrake or other application you use for ripping a DVD.
VLC Windows – See what title is playing
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Linux
From the VLC menu select “Media” and click “Open Disc…” (or press CTRL + D).
VLC Linux (Ubuntu) – Open Disc
Next select the type of disc you’re about to play (DVD), enter the device name and path (VLC will select the most likely device – or use “Browse…“) and click “Play” to start playback.
VLC Linux (Ubuntu) – Select the Disc
From the usual DVD menu (if applicable) start the featured movie – before proceeding make sure the movie is actually playing.
Once the desired movie is playing, select from the VLC menu “Playback” “Title“.
The title marked (see illustration below) is the title you’re looking for … write down title number and playback time of that title so you can find it later in HandBrake or other application you use for ripping a DVD.
VLC Linux (Ubuntu) – See what title is playing
And that’s all there is to in 
…
Comments
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I tried this and no luck. It was playing title 17 so I tried to rip that title. Handbrake aborted after a second.
Joe
Hi Joe,
I’m sorry to hear that. Title 17 should be the right title, but Handbrake could abort for other reasons, most typically the lack of the libdvdcss (see also: Windows, MacOS X, Linux). If that’s not the issue, then check the disk. I’ve found that a dirty disk, that might even play fine in a regular DVD player, can cause similar issues as well.
Hope this helps, let me know if you need more help
…
hans
I highly recommend Ideal DVD Copy (or bluray copy). It’s a no-brainer-$39.97
bryan andrews
One possible reason for the crash of HandBrake is the copy protection in the DVD. Installing libdvdcss might help. But sometimes you may have to turn to more powerful tools like WinX DVD Ripper and DVDfab to rip hard encrypted discs.
Charles
Thanks for chiming in Charles!
You’re very right about that – Handbrake used to fully support DVD decryption, but for a few years now this has no longer been a focus for the Handbrake developers.
Hans
How do you get around rotating titles? Each time I check VLC to tell me what title is playing it changes. Handbrake rips the file and the video is all out of order?
Jeff
Hi Jeff,
That’s interesting to hear, I have never heard of titles that rotate.
For the trick above, you will need a tool like VLC and play the main title, and then look which one it uses.
Which you obviously already tried.
Are you sure that each time you’re playing the featured movie, the same one?
If you’re on a Mac, then the DVD Player that comes with your Mac can show this as well.
hans
I can confirm I’ve experienced the same. Thought I was going mad and just not remembering the title number so wrote it down. The title changes each time I play the main movie. Whichever one I copy, HB stops after about a sec, a file is made but it can’t play anything, not even the movie but out of sequence.
Helen
Hi Helen,
thank you for confirming the phenomena … I haven’t done much with DVD’s in the past years (probably not since 2013), so I have not been able to reproduce this issue.
I’ve done some searching with Google and couldn’t find the issue or a fix for it.
Worth looking into is the option in Handbrake to try “libdvdnav” and “libdvdread” – an option in Handbrake settings/preferences,the option is called “DVD Reader” under macOS.
Unfortunately, I no longer have any DVD’s to test with though
As an alternative, you could try:
Feel free to let us know which one worked best for you, so I can add this to the article.
Hans
Hey Jeff-
Attempting to rip season 15 of south park and running into the same problem. You ever find a solution to this? I had the same thing happening to me: the first three episodes worked the way the OP suggested (track showing in the track list when played, that specific track scanned by handbrake, encoded, working good), but on the fourth episode, it jumps around all over the place. I’d really appreciate your findings if you have any. Thanks.
James
Hi James,
because of some copyright protection trickery, applications like HandBrake might have difficulties detecting what to rip and what not. The best approach I can give you is:
– Use the trick where you open the DVD with (for example) VLC to see what episode is what title,
– Use a commercial application like DVDFab (which is excellent by the way),
– Use MakeMKV (I actually tested this one, originally for ripping BlueRay’s but it works great with DVD’s as well)
There are some other tools out there that I have not (yet) tested: Win X DVDRipper (the free trial keeps working after the trial period they say, with some minor limitations), Free Make Video Converter (this one is a little confusing).
Hope this helps – since the VLC method is great for one movie, but definitely not practical for TV series …
Please share your findings
hans
I did indeed try the MakeMKV, and it solved the Jumping Track problem. Not only did MakeMKV solve the Season 15 Jumping Track problem, when I did the Windows Media Player trick to find the tracks for season 14, the tracks it identified and I therefore ripped didn’t have audio. So, I tried the Make MKV method.
1. Scan DVD with Make MKV. It did an incredible job of identifying the real and fake tracks. No red herrings threw it off at all. Downloaded the five separate episodes per DVD. However, the files directly off the DVD with MakeMKV were large. Some episodes were up to a gig each. This was way too big.
2. Ran it through Handbrake to compress (Open Source -> find file (second option) from MakeMKV [generally ‘track01’]-> select destination folder -> Start Encode). Did it on default 1080p Fast setting. Barely any compromise to quality, and it moved it from a gig down to a much more manageable 70MB or so (1000 MB in a gig).
3. For doing multiple tracks (such as episodes in a TV show), a lot of time can be saved by Adding to Queue once it starts. While the first “track01” is compressing, click Open Source -> find specific file (second option) -> select destination folder -> Add to Queue. This way you can line it up and leave the area.
So the only differences between using Handbrake alone and MakeMKV first is that you add an extra step and you might need a bit of extra room on your hard drive. Of course, once they’re compressed, they larger files from MakeMKV can be deleted. I had no problems with the episodes after this. Hope this helps someone else!
James
Hi James,
glad to hear MakeMKV did the trick, and thank you very much for taking the time to write down your work flow. Excellent!
A step you could add, right after ripping with MakeMKV, is renaming the episodes right away before queueing them in Handbrake with Rename My TV Series – a little program I wrote once upon a time for that purpose (Windows, MacOS X, and Linux available). This way there will be no confusion and you can queue everything and let your computer run for a while …
hans
[…] a school of red herrings, containing just parts of the movie or other such crap. What you need is “The 99 Video Titles Fix”. What you need is […]
[…] For Linux users, VLC is also very helpful to discover the real DVD title for ripping. For more details please visit Hans’ guide here. […]
I know this thread is old, but thanks to your article, I was able to find out which title to copy in a DVD with over 50 titles on the thing – Thank you very much.
emv
Hi EMV,
no worries and thank you very much for taking the time to post a “Thank you” note!
I very much appreciate it and I’m glad it was useful to you!
hans
I tried the VLC trick as follows. I ran a DVD and as it played the movie, I Right Clicked on the display and told VLC to RECORD.
I took the full time to Record the entire movie to my HD as a MPG file. That file played perfectly in VLS, but I do not know how to Edit it, or to Shrink it to fit a Standard DVD. I use DVDDecrypter, DVDShrink, AVStoDVD, Nero 2015, and Imgburn for video. Suggestions please!
BB
Bill Berit
Hi Bill,
by the sound of it, you’re running Windows?
If needed, but I doubt you would need it, you could convert the MPG to MP4 with Handbrake.
For editing, I’d take a look at VideoPad Video Editor, you can do the 14 day trial or get the free version (for non-commercial use). Not sure if the free version links to the Mac or the Windows version, so you may have to open the first link instead and look for the line that says “Get it Free. A free video editor version is available for non-commercial use only. If you will be using it at home you can download the free version here.”
I have used it a few times on my Mac, and it does what they claim. Now keep in mind; I have not tested this one under Windows yet.
Let me know if this works, if not, I’ll help and see what else I can find for you.
hans
Thank you for this article it has helped me alot! I am having an issue with selecting the correct track on disney blurays (hand break default to a title with commentaries). When i followed your guide i find the track in vlc player but that track it auto plays does not match track numbers in handbreak. Am i doing something wrong?
Windows 10 using vlc,hand break and anydvd
Thank you!!
Erik
Hi Erik,
let me start by saying that I have no experience with BluRay disks, so I cannot confirm if HandBrake “rips” these properly or not.
However, MakeMKV should be able to do this properly for you. You can download MakeMKV for free on the MakeMKV website.
After ripping the BluRay, you could use HandBrake to re-compress the video and/or save the file in MP4 format (in case you’d rather not use MKV).
Hope this helps.
hans
Another option when trying to pull episodes from a TV series on disc is to queue up all the video files and start them when you go to bed. When you wake up look at the output files and generally the red herrings will be very short files only the full episodes will be longer files. It is what I have done as the VLC method didn’t work it gave me specific title numbers but only 1 of the ones it gove on a disc with 3 episodes was correct. But by using the queue method it ran all night but in the morning I it had 80 different mp4 files created but only 3 were over 200,000 kbs in size… those were the 3 that were full episodes, all the others were between 3 and 4800 kbs in size so it was easy to tell which one to just delete. I watched a few of the files in the queue going through handbrake and it appears that when it is a red herring it will only eat up about 3 or 4 minutes of time so I suspect the whole process of it doing 80 different titles probably took less than 3 hours.
Yirmin
Hi Yirmin!
This would indeed be a good fallback plan if everything else fails.
Thanks for posting this! I’m sure others will benefit from this as well
hans
the problem is VLC titles will be different than Handbrake titles. For example, VLC might say: title 29 (2:04:30) then in Handbrake the titles will say: Video_TS, VTS_01_0. How to match titles?
dom
Hi Dom,
unfortunately, I do not have a DVD-Rom drive or DVDs any more, so it is difficult to verify this.
It looks like you’re talking about the individual files of a DVD (Video_TS etc) and not the actual titles (or tracks) of the DVD.
With Handbrake you select the entire DVD as a source, and then the “title” option in Handbrake then allows you select a specific “track” or “title”.
So not the individual Video_TS, or VTS_xx_x files.
A title may actually be spread over multiple files, so a file does not represent a track (see also this Wiki page).
In short:
A DVD volume for the DVD-Video format has the following structure of directories and files:
Hope this helps, and apologies if I misunderstood your comment.
Hans
I’m ripping a tv series dvd with the multiple titles. is it safe to assume that the titles with a minute or two are duplicate scenes of the longer titles or do I need to cut and paste those scenes in?
Jill Jones
Typically those shorter ones are indeed duplicates.
They are put in place to mislead ripping software in thinking this is the episode you’re looking for.
For each episode you’ll find one title that holds the correct “file”, which in turn will result in one single file.
Hans
I disagree with the Windows method of determining the proper movie title from the long list of titles on my Transformers – Revenge of the Fallen. I open VLC on my Windows 10 PC and Title 51 is the one that plays. My ripping software tells me the same title is “the title” to rip. I ripped title 51, and it’s incomplete; the end of the mp4 is NOT the actual end of the main feature. When playing on VLC, title 51 ends properly, with the credits at the end, finishing the scrolling of the credits, and ends the movie, as one would see in a DVD player.
Now, if title 51 is the real mcCoy, why did my ripper software not rip an mp4 like the actual movie?
Doug
Hi Doug,
well, in 2013 this worked fine for most DVD’s. There is never a 100% guarantee of course.
These days I’m not doing anything with DVD’s anymore and a lot may have changed when it comes to DVD structures, Windows and VLC changes when it comes to accessing DVD’s, not to mention what your DVD ripping software is using to access the DVD structure.
Since I don’t know what application you’re using for ripping the DVD;
Back in the day I used HandBrake which is free and still available.
Handbrake had 2 options for “reading” the navigation of a DVD: “libdvdread” and “libdvdnav“.
You could give both a try and see which one works best.
Unfortunately, I do not have any DVD’s anymore, and I do not have a DVD drive either, so testing is a little challenging on my end.
I’d be interested in hearing about your findings though!
Hans
Hi,
I just wanted to say Thanks a lot! I was trying to rip a Disney DVD and I was about to lose my mind! I already saw myself ripping 80 something titles and watching them afterwards to find the right one. You just saved me a lot of time and sanity!
Thanks you so much!!!!
Nathalie
Hi Nathalie!
Awesome! Thank you for taking the time to post a thank-you note. It’s always a good motivator to keep going
Hans
I thought you were going to explain how to rip a certain title in vlc as it just keeps rewriting over previous ones and no articles cover this… But nope… You just tell people to use vlc to find the title and use other software to rip? Why can’t vlc just rip a certain title? It’s useless
Joj
Hi Joj,
You’re right – this article is only intended to determine what track to rip when ripping a DVD. At the time (2013!) one of the protection mechanisms was to confuse the DVD ripping sofware when it came to selecting the correct video track and VLC would actually reveal the correct track number, so we could tell tools like Handbrake and such what track to rip.
VLC is definitely not ideal for ripping DVD’s, that is why most prefer using other software for the actual ripping.
Having said that: It is not impossible to rip a DVD with VLC, but it most certainly is not the quickest and/or most reliable way to rip a DVD.
I did find this guide or this guide that show the steps, if you want to give it a try.
Hans
Handbrake is powerful software, but to get the best from it you’ll need to understand some of those details. You might also find that Handbrake won’t rip a whole DVD, but will stop part way through and jump straight to ‘Completed’.
Whereas, to rip 99 title DVDs, here I’d recommend DumboFab DVD Ripper. It allows you to quickly and easily make backups of your multile DVDs, even if the discs are scratched. DumboFab works well all DVDs, including copy-protected discs and special discs which Handbrake doesn’t support. For example, it can handle workout DVDs, 99-title discs, music DVDs and special Japanese DVDs. Just have it a trial.
chris198810
Hi Chris,
Handbrake is indeed powerful, and best of all: FREE.
Note also that when this article was written (2013!), Handbrake was also the go-to tool for DVD ripping and such.
These days Handbrake focuses more on transcoding.
Today, I think the best free alternative would be MakeMKV for ripping DVD and BluRay.
Now when it comes to ripping DVD’s with a commercial product, then my pick would always be DVDFab – hands down.
With their 2 decades of experience with DVD- and BluRay ripping, I’d pick them over any of the other existing commercial products.
Hans
I just wanted to express my deepest gratitude to you! I was in a real bind trying to rip a Disney DVD, and it felt like I was hitting a brick wall at every turn. I was on the brink of losing my mind, imagining myself sifting through countless titles, feeling utterly defeated.
But then, you came to the rescue like a shining beacon of hope! Your solution saved me an incredible amount of time and preserved what little sanity I had left. It’s truly remarkable how a simple act of kindness can make such a profound difference.
Thank you, thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart! Your assistance means more to me than words can express.
ifon
Hi Ifon!
That is fantastic to hear!!
Thank you and I’m super happy this was helpful for you!
Hans