I’m not saying you should copy DVDs… but if you really want to, and you find that the copy protection is proving a little too challenging for your favourite DVD ripper, then mplayer has a very simple way of extracting video from the DVD.

For example, to extract the first title, and save it in a file called out.mpg:

mplayer dvd://1 -dumpstream -dumpfile out.mpg

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