VidCoder is a DVD and Blu-Ray ripping software for the Windows operating system. It makes use of the .net Framwork 4.0 and can therefor only be installed on PCs where the framework is present. The software uses the popular Handbrake as its encoding engine.

Computer users who want to rip a DVD can do so in a few steps. First they need to point VidCoder to a source movie. This can be a DVD or Blu-Ray in a optical drive, or a video folder or file that is already on the computer hard drive.

Once the video source has been selected it is necessary to select a destination for the rip and the video, audio and subtitles that should be included in the rip.

A click on Encoding Settings opens options to configure the output format. The container format used is mp4 by default, which can be changed to mkv. It is furthermore possible to configure the video codec and framerate, specify a target movie size, average bitrate or constant quality as well as audio settings and a lot of advanced options.

Most users of the DVD ripping software can probably keep the default settings while only tech savvy users may want to change them to optimize the output movie.

The main interface has a preview button to preview the selected clip which comes in handy to avoid selecting the wrong title for the ripping.

The selected options can then be added to the queue, which is great for adding multiple titles to it. This is for instance necessary for ripping TV show DVDs which usually come with multiple episodes on a DVD disc.

Feature list

Multi-threaded
MP4, MKV containers
H.264, MPEG-4, Theora video
AAC, MP3, Vorbis, AC3 audio encoding and AC3/DTS passthrough
Target bitrate, size or quality for video
2-pass encoding
Multi-angle support
Decomb, detelecine, deinterlace filters
Batch encoding
Instant source previews
Creates small encoded preview clips
Pause, resume encoding

VidCoder can be downloaded from the project website over at Codeplex. The DVD and Blu-Ray ripper is compatible with all operating systems that support the Microsoft .net Framework 4.

A far better solution – at least for me – is to convert the DVD movies and put them on the hard disk of my notebook. Compressed movies usually have a size of 700 Megabytes to 1.4 Gigabytes which means that my laptop can store several movies without facing storage problems.

Handbrake is a software that lets you easily compress DVD movies. All you need is a Video_TS folder. This is the folder that is on every movie DVD. It is possible to select a preset output like Ipod High-Rez or Apple TV or keep the default one which is simply called normal.

You basically need a Video_TS folder, select a directory and name for the output and click on Encode Video to start the DVD conversion. Several settings can increase the quality of the output. You could for instance raise the bitrate or set a default framerate.

Another nice feature is the ability to queue conversions. You would need all of the Video_TS folders on your hard drive of course unless you want to swap disks after each DVD has been converted.

One should note that Handbrake is not able to convert copy protected DVDs. This means that you would need a different software to copy the contents of the movie DVD to your hard drive (and remove the copy protection) before you can convert the movie further if the DVD is copy protected.

One software that can do this is DVD Fab HD Decrypter. Handbrake is available for Microsoft Windows Apple Macintosh and Linux.

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