How to rip DVDs to your hard drive

Posted on May 12, 2008 at 5:24 am

Looking for a quick and free way to rip DVDs? Maybe because you have a crap load of DVDs in your movie collection? With devices and software like Apple TV and Windows Media Center, what’s the point of having DVD discs anymore!

Just rip all your DVDs to your computer or external storage, install a plugin for Windows Media Player (if you have it), and you’ve now got a digital library of movies that you can watch at any time from anywhere! If you have an xBox 360 or Apple TV, it’s super easy to get your DVDs onto your HDTV.

The process is relatively simple, so even if you are not technically savvy, you should be able to rip all of your DVDs without an issue.

What You’ll Need

So there are a few things that you will need in order for this process to work. Technically, all of the items mentioned are not needed if you simply want to copy your movies to a hard drive and watch them on your computer. However, it’s definitely more fun to watch movies on a giant HDTV while sitting on the couch!

DVD Ripping Software

There are basically two types of software you need (possibly) for ripping and storing DVDs. Firstly, you need an application that can actually rip the DVD, as in copy it off the DVD by breaking the encryption, and a second application to compress the ripped DVD into a much smaller size.

If you have the right hardware and enough space, you can actually not shrink the DVD rips and keep them at full quality. You’ll get better quality, but you’ll also be using up 8GBs per DVD most likely.

There are many applications out there that can rips DVDs, but I’m going to only mention the ones that I know have worked and that are free.

DVD Rip - a full featured DVD copy program written in Perl. It automates the entire DVD-to-hard-drive backup process for you.

RipIt4Me - Is a tool that helps you handle ARccOS or other DVDs messed up by structure based copy protections.

DVDFab Decrypter - Is all-in-one DVD copying/converting/burning software. In just one or two steps, you can copy any DVD to DVDR/PSP/iPod/etc. You’ll need to use this one if you want to rip HD DVDs.

One of those should definitely get you going on ripping your DVDs! Now if you want to shrink the DVDs after they are ripped, you’ll need another piece of software. If none of the programs above can break the encryption on your DVD, try DVD43, a free DVD decrypter that runs in the background and decrypts DVDs on the fly.

Here are my suggestions for shrinking your DVD rips if you want:

DVD Shrink - Works in conjunction with DVD Rip and compresses the DVD image.

HandBrake - Is an open-source, multi-platform, multi-threaded, DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

If you want things to be really easy then just install DVD Shrink with DVD Rip and both of them together will rip and compress the DVD. HandBrake requires a little bit more technical knowledge since you have to tweak the settings, but it can shrink a DVD down to only 750 MB (instead of 8GB)!

Hardware For Ripping DVDs

If you’re planning on ripping a lot of DVDs, it is advisable to go out and but a huge external hard drive, preferably over 1TB. However, these are fairly cheap now, you can grab one from Lacie for only $279.

If you don’t feel like spending any money and you have a spare computer laying around, you can turn it into a NAS! Yes, you can create your own NAS server using a cool open-source software called FreeNAS. I’m not going to go into how to set it up, but it’s not terribly hard.

You’ll also need a home network setup, probably with some kind of wireless router also. This is just so that your computer can connect with your NAS and to your TV to steam media files. Also, you might want to consider a networked media player, such as an Archos or TviX. These are definitely cool devices to have!

You can also have an xBox 360 Live, an Apple TV, or a Windows Media Center computer. All of these will allow you to play your newly ripped media files to your HDTV!

Playing Your DVDs

Now that you have your DVDs ripped, you need to be able to play them. If you have used HandBrake, you can actually convert your ripped DVDs into DivX format. This is the most popular compressed format and most media players will automatically recognize them.

Note that now you should have a folder for each DVD and inside of it two folders, usually VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS. The cool thing about keeping the files in this format is that you can watch the DVDs complete with menus and special features (i.e. subtitles, etc). Also, you can easily burn back these files to a DVD and it’s ready to play in any DVD player.

In order to play your ripped DVDs and browse them easily, you have to use a different application! Yes lots of applications are needed, but it’s worth it.

DVD Play is a helper application that works the media player, VLC, to help you browse and play back your ripped DVDs.

Image Source: LifeHacker

Finally, you can play your DVD library in Windows Media Center with a small little tweak. For some odd reason Microsoft disabled the feature in Windows Media Center on Vista operating system to automatically show ripped DVDs, but it can be enabled very easily. Earlier versions of Media Center show the files fine.

Check out this Microsoft KB article on enabling the DVD library in Media Center for Vista. You can also install several pluins for Windows Media Center that turn it into a cool ripped DVD browsing monster!

My Movies 2 is for Windows Media Center and is a great movie collection management and playback tool. It integrates with Media Center and matches the interface also depending on which OS you are running.

Obviously, there are lots of ways for ripping DVDs, managing them, and streaming them, so feel free to post your own ideas or methods on the subject! Enjoy! Source: LifeHacker

Technorati Tags: rip dvds, how to rip dvds, dvd rip, rip a dvd, dvd rip software, free dvd rip, dvd ripper, rip hd dvd

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13 Responses to “How to rip DVDs to your hard drive”

Moin said on : May 12th, 2008 at 8:47 am

nice tutorial

akishore said on : May 12th, 2008 at 9:54 am

Hi Moin,

Thanks! I’m glad you liked it. I used to always be quite wary of ripping my own DVDs simply because I thought it was too difficult, but it’s actually not that bad! Enjoy!

Techblissonline Dot Com said on : May 12th, 2008 at 10:11 am

yes not bad and a good tutorial here….

NISMO said on : May 12th, 2008 at 10:13 am

…and if you’re looking for completely FREE and powerful CD/DVD and Blu-Ray/HD-DVD burning application you’re welcomed to give a try to StarBurn from Rocket Division Software.

Just in case here’s an URL: StarBurn

Arigato!

-ichiro

bert said on : May 12th, 2008 at 2:49 pm

I use both DVDShrink & DVDFAB, they’re great! Shrink doesn’t need DVDRip by it’s side to compress the video files, it does it on it’s own.
Also one can rip with DVDFAB and import the files to Shrink, for shrinking obviously. Sometimes Shrink can’t process a certain DVD, FAB will do the job then almost certainly.
WMP also plays ripped DVD’s, rightclick in the bottom bar>open… then browse to the desired file/folder.
Generally speaking it’s also good to create a backup of your dvd’s, after too much use they will start showing scratchmarks and stop playing.

Haris said on : May 13th, 2008 at 12:21 pm

A very nice, helpful and a handy tutorial. Keep up the good work!

Stumbled!

akishore said on : May 13th, 2008 at 3:44 pm

Haris, thanks for the stumble! That’s nice of you!!!

Nirmal said on : May 14th, 2008 at 1:02 am

Nice tutorial, not tried DVD ripping yet.

Laura said on : May 29th, 2008 at 8:08 am

Thanks for the info. One quick question. How do you open the DVD to view it in Media Player (Windows XP)? In the Video_TS file, there are many files. How do you know which to use to watch DVD?

Lance said on : June 1st, 2008 at 8:58 pm

Laura, you have to chose “open directory” under the file menu of the VLV media player, than choose the Video_TS folder-that should bring up the DVD Menu (or previews if there are some on the disk). This is the “DVD Disc” experience you are looking for. Don’t open the folder containing the files! I am a mac guy so watching ripped movies on a PC is new to me . . . what a pain compared to the mac, and its built-in DVD player-None of this codecs BS. It is a lot less complicated. I rip my dvd to my macs HD using something called “mac the ripper” and I start watching them with the DVD Player that is superior in performance and emulation to anything I have seen on the PC side. Apple’s DVD player is very similar in user interface to the controls you have in a stand alone DVD player. Stuff just works on the mac side without hours spent online troubleshooting incompatibilities that you get here on the PC side. That said, PCs have many things going for them over the mac-customizability, for one, way superior game play!. I will always have both PCs and macs at home and the office-but it is true that the learning curb on the pc side is steep, and never ending. It is sad that pc folk are stuck w/ windows. The mac just works as intended with most of your time spent learning programs, not learning how to make the computer work. I spent two hours of my time today trouble shooting a “codec” problem on my pc instead of organizing my movie collection ( and transferring my rips from a mac external harddrive). This just doesnt happen with my macs.

Laura said on : June 4th, 2008 at 4:57 pm

Thank you Lance. That’s exactly what I needed to know.

Brett said on : August 11th, 2008 at 6:35 am

How does DVD Play work with VLC? I downloaded both but there are no instructions for DVD Play? Also I wanted to use My Movies, but do not have Windows Media Center installed, is that my only option?

george said on : August 21st, 2008 at 11:00 am

In your “Hardware For Ripping DVDs” section, you dont really talk about hardware for ripping DVDs at all.. You discuss about where to store ripped files - external file storage and NAS..

What about the DVD/CD drive and ripping software combination that you used?

It is difficult to find DVD/CD hardware and software combination which will give you an accurate rip.. Often I have tried to rip a CD and maybe only half the tracks get ripped onto the hard drive and some of those tracks dont work..

Do you have any advice about that?