Ripping DVDs
I have always wanted to backup my DVD collection. I have a lot of fringe and unorthodox DVDs. And no, I don’t mean porn movies. A number of my DVDs cannot be found in typical video shops. One of my main worries is that they could get damaged and thus rendered unwatchable.
Fortunately there is a software called Mac The Ripper, which allows me to copy the DVD onto my hard drive, removing the region controls and all sorts of copy protections. Best of all, the software is free. Take note, however, that I am not in anyway espousing DVD piracy. I just want to backup my special DVDs, and maybe even view it on my iPod Touch.
MTR was a breeze to use. All I did was pop in a DVD, launch MTR, and it was able to detect the DVD. The default settings were good enough so all I had to do was press “GO” and after about an hour I had the DVD backed up onto my hard drive.
As you may know, some DVDs have a lot of “extra features.” Some have trailers at the beginning of the disk. All these “extra features” add up to extra gigabytes. I recently ripped a copy of “300″ and the size was about 6.2 GB. This may not be an issue if you plan to watch the DVD off the hard drive, but if you want to burn the movie onto a DVD-R disk for playback on a DVD player, you will encounter some problems because a typical DVD-R disk only has a capacity of 4.67GB. Fortunately, MTR has the capability to rip only the main feature. I still haven’t tried to copy the content back to a DVD-R though—MTR recommends Roxio Toast to achieve this.
December 29 2007 11:42 am | Software and Video
