Get Thoggen, and leave your DVDs at home

Cool name with an even cooler concept! Thoggen gives Linux users the ability to easily rip DVDs into the free Ogg Theora format. And since you are not using any patented formats to back-up your DVDs, you won’t be breaking any (as many) laws when doing service for the family DVD collection.

Thoggen is a new DVD ripper/backup-tool for Linux that encodes video into the free Ogg Theora format. Unlike its rivals, Thoggen is easy to use, and its built-in support for the Theora codec instead of the patent-restricted MPEG-4 and derivatives makes it worth looking at.

On its surface, Thoggen is a DVD backup and extraction tool (i.e., “ripper”). You use it to make a copy of the video titles on your DVD, either because you worry about damaging frequently played discs, because watching compressed video from the hard disk is faster and less power-hungry than watching it from a DVD drive, or perhaps because you simply need portability. The thought of carrying every episode of “Arrested Development” wherever you go is certainly appealing, but even slimline DVD boxed sets get cumbersome on a daily commute.

Some DVD extractors are limited to pulling content off of a disc as-is, leaving you with a set of gargantuan .VOB files. Others that take the next step, encoding the video in a space-saving compressed format. Most of these utilize a variant of the MPEG-4 Part 2 codec: XviD, DivX, 3ivx, et cetera.

The trouble is that MPEG-4 is patented, and in order to use it legally you need a license, even if you’ve jumped every other legal hurdle Hollywood throws at the public these days — I mean content like public domain, unencrypted DVDs. Certainly there are people out there with nefarious ends in mind, for whom such issues make zero difference, but what about the rest of us? Well, thanks to Thoggen, we have a tool to extract and repackage DVD video in a royalty-free, patent-free format. Source: Linux.com

[tags]dvds,mpeg-4,divx,xvid,thoggen,3ivx,public domain[/tags]