Tool for legal video ripping & snipping?

[SiorX]

So, I'm putting together a presentation for an academic conference. I want to use a clip about 47 seconds long from a recently released DVD. As far as I can work out, that should be entirely legal fair dealing.

Does anybody know of any software that will allow me to extract a short piece like that from a movie? It's not even a full chapter, but comes right in the middle of one. Seems now it's way harder than the halcyon days of hooking two vcrs together, which was the last time I tried something like this.

(My original plan was just to have the dvd set up ready to go, running in the background behind PP, but I've just found out that with the set-up I'll be using that's not going to be possible.)

 

[farmkid]

As I understand it (and I'm no expert on these matters, so take it for what it's worth), the illegal part is breaking the encryption, not the copying. You can make the copy as long as you can find a way to do it without decrypting it. I don't know of any way to do that without going through an analog intermediate. In other words, play it on a DVD player and capture the video with a DVD recorder or VCR or video capture device attached to a computer. That comes with it's own problems, in that most such recording devices won't record anything with Macrovision protection. To overcome that, you will need to find a device that ignores Macrovision or use a video stabilizer or time-base corrector.

Yeah, I know. It's getting complicated for just a 47 second clip. Perhaps you can find it somewhere online where you can just download it and cut the unwanted portions.

 

[STR]

Per the DMCA, the act of hacking the decryption scheme is illegal. So, the people that wrote the tool (DVDFab rocks, I use its free decyption program to copy the whole disc image to drive, then encode it into a usable file using Handbrake) you use would if committed a crime IF they lived in the United States. You as an end user, since you didn't actually crack anything, are not liable for anything and are fact just exercising your rights to fair use.