Video Ripping Kingdom Hearts II FMVs: Tools and Tutorial

Updated tool: link

In this guide, I will describe how to rip the pre-rendered videos from the Kingdom Hearts II PS2 disc. There are already a few KH2 FMV ripping guides on the Internet, but I aim for this one to be detailed, complete, and simple to do.

Many steps involve the command line. If you are unfamiliar with it, scripts provided by me will take out most of the hassle of needing to know what each command-line program does and how to use it.

Prerequisites include that you have administrator access to a fairly modern Windows or Linux computer, about 3 GB of free hard drive space, a working sound card, a disc drive that can read PS2 discs, and a copy of KH2. Extracting on Mac's OS X should also be possible, but won't be coverd here as I do not own, nor have access to one.

All required programs are available for free. I have bundled the scripts and required programs in a 7-Zip and Tar archive. Here is the list of programs needed for this guide:

Cygwin, a collection of ported GNU tools which are needed to run my scripts, only specific utilites needed are included in the 7-Zip file (this program is not needed if on a Linux computer, GNU tools come standard on Linux);
PSS_demux, used to separate video and audio data from the PSS files (Windows only, but runs on Wine with Visual C++ 6 libraries);
MPlayer, used to convert the audio file into something a little more format-friendly for encoding (Linux users can install MPlayer using their package manager).

Download the scripts and tools:
Windows: kh2fmv.7z 7.2 MB
Linux: kh2fmv.tar.gz 46.5 KB

Scripts have been tested on Ubuntu 10.10, Windows 2000, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. All Windows systems were emulated virtually, but they should work on native installs as well.

Step one: Extracting the PSS files

PSS stands for PlayStation Stream. These files contain the video and audio data for the FMVs.

Insert your KH2 disc into your computer's disc drive. An ISO file can be used in place of an actual disc.

In Linux, open a terminal window and run kh2fmv.sh. This script will work with KH2 NTSC-J, NTSC-U, PAL, and Final Mix.

The script will check if a KH2 disc is in a disc drive, if not, it will ask where an ISO image file of KH2 is, if found, it will start extracting the PSS files from it.

You can also provide ISO location as an argument:

In Windows, this is very much the same. Open a command prompt by executing the console.bat file.

As you may have noticed, it extracts ena.pss first, which is the ending and also the largest FMV in KH2, so please be patient if you are on a slow computer. After the script is done, you should have 11 PSS files, or 12 if ripping from Final Mix.

Step two: Demux the PSS files using PSS_demux

PSS_demux is included in both the 7-Zip and Tar archives.
You can execute PSS_demux by typing PSS_demux.exe into the command prompt and pressing enter, Linux users will first have to give it executable permissions. Drag the PSS files you wish to convert into the new window that appears. PSS_demux should then create a M2V and DAT file for each PSS file.

Step three: Append the missing header information to the DAT files & convert them into WAVE

The DATs are ATRAC3 audio files with header information missing. Headers are data at the start of a file that tells the OS what type of file it is. To get programs to be able to correctly read the DATs, we need to append the ATRAC3 header information to them.

Then, we're going to convert the audio files into something more compatible. To bypass the need to install an ATRAC3 codec, we're going to use the movie player MPlayer.
MPlayer has native support for ATRAC3, and has audio file output functionality. Linux users can install MPlayer though their package manager. The 7-Zip file will have the MPlayer executable for Windows users.

Running the dat2wav.bat (Windows) or dat2wav.sh (Linux) script will automate this otherwise complicated step for you.

Conclusion

You should now have playable video and audio files for each FMV. The next thing to do would be to encode and mux the video and audio. I will not explain how, as I believe that would merit its own separate guide. RipBot264 is a Windows application that I've used before that tries to simplify encoding.

It should be noted that KH2 FMVs have a display aspect ratio of 16:10 (pixel aspect, 11:10), non-standard for MPEG2, M2V files are flagged as having an aspect of 4:3 instead. Keep this in mind when re-encoding the videos.

The only reason I can think of to not re-encode the videos is if you're using the videos for editing and want the maximum quality possible. Just remember to resize the videos within your video editing software before rendering.

If you want to just watch the videos on your computer right now, you can use MPlayer.

Next up is Re:CoM.

EDIT: I've found that someone has already made tools available that automates KH2 ripping, it's very similar to mine. You can check it out here.

 

I would like to give you a thank you on this. I was looking into doing this and sure enough you posted it. You might not be the first one, but you saved me having to search one out.

 

That will save you a lot of time. It is great to see there is a good guide on this.

 

Now that the semester is over, just want everyone to know that I will be starting work on the extractors for Re:CoM. It will be like 10 times more complicated to make because of the sheer amount of FMVs in that game.

Re:CoM extractor is now done!
Windows
Linux