Cannot RIP AIR dvd

[Cloudius]

I want to make an Air amv, but I can't find a DVD ripper that 1. is free, and 2. will read my dvd and rip it. I've got windows Vista, and it's the AIR complete series disc 1 of 2. Can anyone guide me on what I can do to accomplish this? Thanks! I'm totally new with this and know NOTHING about this kind of thing so dummify the steps so much that a 3 year old could do it please. Otherwise I will be asking a bajillion questions and I don't joke when i say bajillion. Here are a few if you answer them anyway:

Does ripping take the footage off the DVD, or just make a copy of it on my PC?
After I rip a dvd, can I still use it to watch on a regular DVD player?
What is the ifo file on the disc? Are these important?
Shouldn't there be only 1 vob file on the disc for each episode? So why are there about 5 or 6 per "title"?
How can I find out what title I need to rip to get the episodes I want?

[mirkosp]

Read <a href=http://www.a-m-v.org/guides/avtech31/>ErMaC & AbsoluteDestiny's Friendly AMV Guides Lovingly Overhauled Largely by Zarxrax</a>.

[Kariudo]

Does ripping take the footage off the DVD, or just make a copy of it on my PC?

It's making a copy. Ripping is the process of taking the content on a dvd and removing encryption/copy protection so you can use the footage in other programs.

After I rip a dvd, can I still use it to watch on a regular DVD player?

Yep, ripping doesn't do anything to the dvd physically. The dvd won't know you did it, and neither will any dvd player.

What is the ifo file on the disc? Are these important?

IFO files contain navigation and track information (video, language, subtitle). Just think of it like a special playlist file. It's not important for our purposes though.

Shouldn't there be only 1 vob file on the disc for each episode? So why are there about 5 or 6 per "title"?

They do that to make it harder to find the individual episodes.

How can I find out what title I need to rip to get the episodes I want?

There isn't really a good way to do that. You usually end up ripping all of the larger vobs and determine the ones that have the episodes with DGIndex/DVD2AVI. Usually, vobs larger than about 100,000 KB are targets for ripping.

[Cloudius]

Awesome. Thanks a ton. I've learned so much and I found a working way that get's the job done for me. I thought this would be a really hard and complicated thing to set up and do, but in fact it was fairly simple. Thanks for the guidance.

[mirkosp]

Shouldn't there be only 1 vob file on the disc for each episode? So why are there about 5 or 6 per "title"?

They do that to make it harder to find the individual episodes.

Actually, the reason is just that VOB files are limited to about 1GB max in filesize, so after that, another VOB is made with the rest of the footage, hence why you get VTS_01_1, VTS_01_2, VTS_01_3, etc...
As for which VOBs have episodes, DVD Fab has the "Main Movie" ripping option, which shows you content separed. You can easily see the length and even preview the various parts to just rip the episodes themselves.
If you are using DVD Decrypter, you can make use of the IFO Mode for pretty much the same thing.

[Kariudo]

coulda sworn that splitting eps across several vobs was a way to confuse the "Select main PGC" options in rippers. Maybe I'm just imagining it...

[Mister Hatt]

You must be because the PGS Editors in decent ripping software don't run on VOB's, they run on chapter points, and the "main movie" selector is done by the longest string of chapters.

VOBs have to be split to 1GB due to filesystem restrictions on the disc itself rather than anything in their filetype. I second the motion to use IFO mode in DVD Decrypter. It is still the best technique I know of.