Thoggen is a DVD ripper

DVD ripper

A DVD ripper is a software program that facilitates copying the content of a DVD to a hard disk drive. They are mainly used to transfer video on DVDs to different formats, to edit or back up DVD content, and to convert DVD video for playback on media players and mobile devices...

 for Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 within the GNOME

GNOME

GNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. It is composed entirely of free and open source software...

 project. It is based on GStreamer

GStreamer

GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework written in the C programming language with the type system based on GObject.GStreamer allows a programmer to create a variety of media-handling components, including simple audio playback, audio and video playback, recording, streaming and editing...

 and Gtk+

GTK+

GTK+ is a cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU LGPL, allowing both free and proprietary software to use it. It is one of the most popular toolkits for the X Window System, along with Qt.The name GTK+ originates from GTK;...

. Thoggen can back up DVDs by re-encoding them using the Ogg Theora video codec

Codec

A codec is a device or computer program capable of encoding or decoding a digital data stream or signal. The word codec is a portmanteau of "compressor-decompressor" or, more commonly, "coder-decoder"...

.

Thoggen is designed to be easy and straightforward to use. It attempts to hide the complexity many other transcoding tools expose and tries to offer sensible defaults that work well for most people most of the time.

Features

• Encodes into Ogg
  Ogg
  Ogg is a free, open container format maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The creators of the Ogg format state that it is unrestricted by software patents and is designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of high quality digital multimedia.The Ogg container format can multiplex...
  
  /Theora
  Theora
  Theora is a free lossy video compression format. It is developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation and distributed without licensing fees alongside their other free and open media projects, including the Vorbis audio format and the Ogg container....
  
   video
• Based on the GStreamer multimedia framework
• Supports title preview, picture cropping and resizing.
• Language Selection for audio track
• Can encode from local directory with video DVD files

Weaknesses

• Thoggen is slow.

• Thoggen can only encode video into the Theora codec. But since the software is based on the GStreamer multimedia framework, it is fairly easy to add additional encoding formats/codecs in future versions.
• Thoggen includes a feature to "make video certain quality". However, the numerics to choose from (ranging from 0 to 63) for the encoding process are less-than-obvious to interpret for users.
• Subtitles are not yet supported

See also

• Theora
  Theora
  Theora is a free lossy video compression format. It is developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation and distributed without licensing fees alongside their other free and open media projects, including the Vorbis audio format and the Ogg container....
  
  
• MEncoder
  MEncoder
  MEncoder is a free command line video decoding, encoding and filtering tool released under the GNU General Public License. It is a close sibling to MPlayer and can convert all the formats that MPlayer understands into a variety of compressed and uncompressed formats using different codecs.MEncoder...
  
  
• List of GNOME applications
• List of video editing software

External links

• Official website
• SourceForge project page