The developers of the free version were also offering a commercial version on their website called WinX DVD Ripper Platinum. The commercial version provides access to additional features and advanced settings making it worthwhile for some users. The free version could for instance not rip a DVD straight into a format supported by Apple’s iPhone or iPod. Users who wanted that functionality had to use a video converter to do that which usually meant double the work and time.

Why are we writing all this? Because the developers have decided to offer WinX DVD Ripper Platinum for free in September. You can head right over to their website and download the commercial version of this excellent DVD ripping software for free. A quick chat with one of the representatives of the company revealed that minor updates will be available for free as well while major updates, e.g. a version bump to 6, would not be free but could be purchased for a small amount of money. Updates are not mandatory on the other hand which means that users can work with the version of the DVD ripper for as long as they like.

WinX DVD Ripper Platinum will automatically recognize video DVDs. The structure of the DVD is automatically displayed in the program’s interface with the main movie selected by default. The interface looks pretty much like the one used in WinX DVD Ripper with the exception of a few additions. Options to convert the DVD to various formats that are supported by devices like iPods, Apple TVs, PDA or Zune are displayed next to the general format options known from the free version of the software program.

Next to the additional devices that are supported by the platinum version of WinX DVD Ripper are the inclusion of a high definition encoding engine which promises a superior audio and video quality over its free version of the software.

The DVD ripper can rip copy protected DVDs and supports all other features of the free version. Users who are looking for a reliable and easy to use DVD ripping software might want to download this program and install it for a test ride. The offer to download the premium version of WinX DVD Ripper for free lasts until the end of September.

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All you need to do is to put the DVD movie into the DVD drive of the computer and click on Load DVD in the program interface. It will load the DVD contents with the option to preview them. The program has pull down menus for selecting one of the available audio tracks and subtitles that will be included in the rip.

The only other customization option is to select the target size for the output file and one out of three encoding profiles (avi, video CD and super video CD).

A click on convert will start the ripping process and save the file to the computer’s hard drive. The only nuisance of the program was that it did automatically open a website with another DVD ripping tool by the same author as advertisement. A viable alternative without advertisement is the one-click dvd ripping tool Bitripper.

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Those three are probably the most common uses other than playing movie DVDs on the computer which can be done with virtually any program.

The tools listed below have been tested extensively and completely free, most are Open Source. If you know of a tool that is not in the list but should be let me know and I add it after evaluating it.

Play movie DVDs on the computer:

I rarely play movie DVDs on the computer, heck I dislike watching movies on the computer and prefer to watch them on the big TV screen. My video player of choice, SMPlayer, can play movie DVDs.

It does not offer a menu driven interface but different chapters, subtitles and titles can be selected from the menu. No need for additional specialized software in most cases.

Rip movie DVDs in DVD format to the computer:

Tools in this section:

DVD Smith Movie Backup
DVD Fab HD Decrypter
DVD Shrink

Here we have to distinguish between applications that rip the movie but retain DVD quality and those that rip the movie into a compressed format like avi or a portable format so that it can be played on a mobile phone or iPod.

DVD Smith Movie Backup can backup a DVD to the computer with little user interaction. It can deal with copy protections so that all movies can be copied with ease.

An alternative to that is DVD Fab HD Decrypter which offers all the features of DVD Smith Movie Backup plus the option to make the movie region code free.

Both store the movie in a Video_TS folder on the hard drive which has approximately the same size as the DVD.

The third tool is DVD Shrink which can reduce the size of the ripped movie which comes in handy if you have a DVD-9 movie and want to burn the backup on a DVD-5. DVD Shrink handles all copy protection as well.

Rip movie DVDs in compressed format to the computer:

Tools in this section:

Auto Gordian Knot
Bitripper
Handbrake

Converting movie DVDs into a compressed format has many advantages. One is the ability to store multiple movies in the place that one full DVD rip would take on the hard drive. A general size of around 700 Megabytes for a compressed movie would mean that about six movies fit into the place of one full DVD backup.

Another example where it does make sense is mobile computing. If you want to store movies on your iPhone, mobile phone, netbook or UMPC you have to take size into consideration because they usually come with hard drive or flash drive sizes of 20 Gigabytes or less.

Auto Gordian Knot can convert movie DVDs into avis. Minimal user interaction is required for the process. The only limitation of the program is that it cannot handle copy protected movies. To overcome this users could first backup the movie to hard disk with one of the applications mentioned above and rip it from there.

Handbrake is another tool which can handle basic CSS protection and convert the movie into additional formats like mkv, mp4 and ogm.

Bitripper finally handles DVD copy protection with ease and requires minimal user input to rip the DVD to the computer. The main benefit of Bitripper is its ease of use, no technical knowledge is required to rip the DVDs.

Convert Videos to DVD Format:

Tools in this section:

AVStoDVD
DVD Flick

DVD Flick supports a wide variety of formats which is its greatest strength, a total of 60 video and 45 audio codecs are supported by the application. It supports subtitles, PAL and NTSC DVDs and can burn the created DVD right after the creation has finished.

The biggest advantage of AVStoDVD is the ease of use. Just add videos to the program interface and it will automatically calculate the correct size to fit all the videos on a DVD-5 or DVD-9 depending on the users selection. Everything is created automatically and it can also burn the DVD after the DVD creation process.

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Bitripper [via Freeware Genius] scans the DVD drive of the computer and immediately detects a video DVD that is inserted into the drive. A click on Start Ripping would initialize the ripping process and that’s it. No technical questions about bitrates, formats or resolutions, just plain and simple DVD ripping. The software offers settings naturally, the video can be saved as mpg or avi on the hard drive of the computer.

The settings button leads to a configuration window that allows the selection of the video and audio codec as well as the aspect radio, resolution and language track. Ripping a DVD with a playtime of 1:38 hours took roughly 1:20 hours on my old fashioned AMD Athlon 3000+.

The main benefit of using Bit Ripper is its simplicity. DVDs can be ripped with just a few clicks and almost no technical knowledge other than selecting the right track, video codec and output format. The software supports ripping from both 4.7 GB and 8 GB DVDs and can copy copy-protected DVDs as well.

Since it was designed for ease of use I do not miss the features that Samer pointed out in his article. You cannot use Bitripper to rip a DVD in a format that is supported by a mobile device for instance and can only save them in avi or mpg format. The one thing that I think is missing is subtitle support. There is no option to select subtitles that you would like to take over which is essential if you are ripping an Asian DVD with English subtitles, Vampire Hunter D anyone ?

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Three other features that are only in the commercial version of FairUse Wizard are mentioned on his homepage: quality encoding modes, the possibility to remove unnecessary elements of the DVD and encoding profiles for a variety of devices like the iPhone or Apple TV that guarantee best quality. Installation is a breeze, after installing the main program you are asked if you want to install a toolbar. I would suggest to say no to this installation unless you want to try it out.

The main benefit of the software is that you can create DVD rips either from DVD or by selecting an DVD Iso image from the hard drive with just a few clicks that are heavily optimized. No need to fiddle around with performance and quality settings, it’s all there already and the defaults are working fine.

And there is still the possibility to use your own settings if you like and know what you are doing. FairUse Wizard 2 can not rip copy protected DVDs which is a severe limitation. The author suggests to use DVD Decrypter to create an ISO image of your DVD.

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Free DVD MP3 Ripper is a prime example of a software that I like. It is small and easy to use with only a few options to choose from. The music ripper supports vob, dat, mpeg-1 and mpeg-2 movie files which translates to DVDs, (S)VCDs and MPEG movie sources.

Users can preview the movie and the audio of the movie and select a range that should be ripped instead of ripping the full movie. The output settings and ID3 tags can be customized and edited as well. Everything is accessible in the main window which makes this an error proof software to use.

The projected size of the audio file is displayed as well, nice if you want to keep the audio files below a certain size.

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The only aspect that is a little bit confusing is the menu structure. Since this is basically a free version of DVDFab Gold and Platinum not all options are accessible in the main menu. It is only possible to rip the DVD or HD movie to your hard disk removing all copy protection in the process or to uncheck certain elements, such as extra languages or trailers, on the disk before you do that.

The options should be your first stop before you start using DVDFab HD Decrypter. Make sure you change the temp and output directories if your c: drive does not have enough space to hold a full DVD or HD movie.

The Region Code is removed as well by default making the disk universally playable on all players. It seems however that this setting has to be changed in the options whenever a disk with a different region code is inserted. It was automatically set to region 2 and it did not change when I placed a region 1 disk in the drive.

Still no problem unless you have a lot of disks from different regions. DVDFab HD Decrypter is a great tool if you want to copy DVD or HD movies with or without copy protection. Please note that using this tool might be illegal in some countries.

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Everyone would now assume that I would take the DVDs and their cases with me but this is not the case. I came up with a method that would add all DVDs that I wanted to view to the hard drive of my notebook which meant that I did not have to stuff the DVDs somewhere securely to make sure they would not break during the journey.

RatDVD is a DVD compressor that creates playable compressed versions of DVDs including all the extras such as subtitles, menus and goodies. The size is usually between 1 and 2 Gigabytes even when converting DVD-9 disks. If you would just copy the DVD onto your hard drive the size would be between 4,5 and 8 Gigabytes of data usually.

It is possible to add ten or even twenty compressed DVDs to your hard drive making this a very effective way to take a lot of movies with you on your holidays.

Another aspect that should not be overlooked is the fact that you can play the DVDs in compressed form with many video players which means that you do not have to unpack them before watching the movie.

You might be asking about the difference between using RatDVD and a converter that would rip the file into divx or a comparable format. This is indeed a good question. RatDVD files are larger but contain all the extras that have been placed on the original DVD as well while most other formats do not add those extras to the conversion.

The output quality will only be equal if you use a high enough bitrate and resolution for the divx conversion which in turn increases the file size again.

I would still suggest to use RatDVD because it is in my opinion much easier to handle than most video converters. Just select a compatible file, click on DVD > RatDVD and let RatDVD do the rest. That’s a two click conversion of a DVD.

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