Ripping a TV show DVD is not as simple as ripping a movie DVD, since TV show DVDs have multiple episodes and are often improperly authored, either purposely or due to incompetence. DVD converters may convert the episodes into lots of segments and you have to cut and join them to get a correct file.

Then if you want to convert an improperly authored TV show DVD into a single file in AVI which is one of the most popular video format, how to make it easier yet for free? Following is the solution. For converting each episode to an individual AVI file, please refer to this article.

Use DVD Shrink to Re-author the DVD.

1. Rip the DVD to the hard disk drive first if DVD Shrink cannot decrypt it and then open the VIDEO_TS folder in DVD Shrink.
2. Select Re-author from the top menu
3. Select the episodes you want and drag them to the left panel under the DVD structure.
4. Select Backup on the top menu and select where you want to save the result files.

DVD Shrink Re-author

There is also a detail DVD Shrink Re-author tutorial you can refer to. After the re-authoring, you get the episodes without other extras and can re-number to place the episodes in correct order for encoding and then joining.

Convert the Re-authored DVD files to AVI

Use AutoGK to convert the DVD files to AVI files:

AutoGK

Merge to One AVI file

To join the separate AVI files to one file, we can use VirtualDub. Here is the detail guide on how to do this.

The above method is easy to use but is troublesome with three steps. The easiest method is to convert the DVD to an AVI file directly in one step, by using a commercial DVD ripper which allows you to convert DVD to whatever format and meanwhile lets you choose to merge the converted files  into a single one or not. This way can say you much time and what’s more important is you get the video with much better quality.

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