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

[tags]rip dvds, how to rip dvds, dvd rip, rip a dvd, dvd rip software, free dvd rip, dvd ripper, rip hd dvd[/tags]

» Filed Under Computer Tips

Comments

57 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: rocketdivision.com/starburn.html

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?

RkyLeX said on : October 29th, 2008 at 9:55 pm

Can’t make my xbox 360 to read and stream the video_ts folder for all my movies. It is on Windows Media Center, and xbox finds the folder but it shows like empty, what do i need to do?

Gloria said on : October 31st, 2008 at 11:38 am

You make it sound pretty easy! Does this work for Region 2 DVDs as well? Or is there another way to do those?

Ernie said on : November 26th, 2008 at 9:50 pm

Great info. Downloaded dvdfab and now i’m rippin and watching movies on my vista home media center pc. One question though, when i pull up the dvd library in media center i see the titles but the cover art is not there. Is there a way to get the cover art and dvd info to display in media center?

BigP said on : January 23rd, 2009 at 8:56 am

I use clonedvd and Anydvd it’s flawless, works a dream..

Heather said on : April 6th, 2009 at 11:05 am

I am sorry – I think I missed something. I am new to the tar files. I finally got them downloaded, saved and unzipped, but how do I install them. It talks about installing on their web page, but I don’t know where I am supposed to put the coding. I did read that tar files could be installed on an XP op system. Am I wrong on this? Any help would be very appreciated. Thanks – H

Tommy said on : April 29th, 2009 at 9:03 am

Is this software capable of ripping Blue Ray? If not, do you provide anything that does?

Heather E. said on : May 8th, 2009 at 3:17 pm

Thank you for the information above. My father has hundreds of DVDs and I will be putting them on external drives and then using apple tv to access them. (A video guy told him that he would need to get a special media drive which would cost several thousand dollars. I thought that that sounded ridiculous!) I am using itunes, Handbrake, VDC, and MetaX for the tags. I know that I must move the itunes music folder onto the external drive. Is there a problem with having more than one external drive (as he has so many DVDs) and thus several music folders that itunes uses? Can they simply be names “music folder 1″, “2″, etc?

Alex said on : June 6th, 2009 at 7:49 am

Can anyone help me rip DVDs to my Netbook either through a tutorial or a phone call?

adam fiveson said on : June 25th, 2009 at 1:15 pm

I’ve been using AnyDVD, DVD Shrink, Decrypt for some time now… taking my collection of about 4000 titles (I collect DVD’s) and putting them onto an array of 1.5TB hard drives for use on a Slingcatcher… essentially creating a jukebox for my collection.

I am on a PC… not a mac.

I’ve noticed there are certain DVD’s which will work with Decrypter, but not with Shrink and vise versa.

Now I’m facing a new issue… several of my commercial DVD’s don’t even show up at all… they will not mount… the drive (J:) stays untitled, and when I double click the disk letter, the message is “please insert disk”.

Is there a way for me to get windows to recognize these disks?

I am using a Lightscribe DVDMulti Recorder to mount the disks.

Thanks in advance for helping me here,

Adam

shawn said on : October 15th, 2009 at 11:24 am

i want to rip my own home video to my computer so i can edit it and my own family movies

RichardL said on : November 3rd, 2009 at 8:55 pm

Is there a way to rip the Audio only from a DVD to Windows Media Player 11, running on Vista or XP?

roxanne said on : November 7th, 2009 at 6:31 pm

I’m stuck, I have used dvdfab & stored the dvd file on my external hard drive. When I connect the hard drive to my dvd player it asks to open the file which then shows all the titles. I select the main movie there is an error not video codec?

Can anyone help? I just want an easy way to transfer my dvd collection to my external hard drive & then play through my dvd player…….thanks

rjulyanto said on : November 29th, 2009 at 2:35 am

thank you for the tutorial and reference. Handbrake works best for ripping DVDs…!

Shaneo said on : December 8th, 2009 at 8:20 am

THANKS for all help. very useful. I’m now setting the wheels in motion of a disk free movie collection

stellans said on : December 17th, 2009 at 8:57 am

Are the instructions above still current, given the software advances by both Apple and Microsoft?

ted said on : December 27th, 2009 at 10:41 pm

After I rip a dvd I have it go to a folder in my documents!My brother said it also goes to a different place and if I dont delete it it will slow down my computer!I dont know where else it goes to!I need help plz!

JulianH said on : December 28th, 2009 at 12:31 pm

Hi

I don’t watch TV as it’s unwatchable these days and instead have an extebsive DVD colection so I can choose what I watch. But it is a hassle to keep selecting and changing and what I’d really like is to be able to set up half a dozen ‘channels’ on a media player/hard drive to play my DVDs randomly and/or in a loop on each channel which would also be categorised (eg comedy on one ‘channel’, drama on another, documentaries, and so on). Is this possible? If so, how do I go about it?

jerry said on : December 29th, 2009 at 9:26 pm

if you want to rip CSS protected DVD and edit DVD videos, “Daniusoft DVD ripper” will be a good choice.

Simone said on : December 30th, 2009 at 10:12 am

Fantastic! You made this tutorial very easy to understand. Downloaded DVDFab 6 from you link and it was simple. Was able to copy a dvd to dvd in about 10mins. Thank You for making it possible for me.

Andhol said on : January 9th, 2010 at 6:51 am

Hi all, got it to work but the files don’t have sound when I play them back. Any suggestions?

Joy Smith said on : January 11th, 2010 at 1:22 pm

Once you rip the DVD to your computer, can you use the same program to burn it to another DVD?

pengsz said on : January 12th, 2010 at 2:00 am

iMoviesoft DVD Ripper is a powerful and easy to use DVD ripping program which can rip DVD videos to almost all popular video/audio formats with unimaginable fast speed and great quality like original DVDs. It can convert all DVD videos to AVI, MP4, 3GP, MPEG, WMV, MOV, FLV, MP3, M4A, WMA, WAV etc.

imoviesoft.com/products/dvd-ripper.html

jmac said on : January 13th, 2010 at 2:59 pm

IT was nice to finally see people REALLY! helping out each other. (Great tutorial one of the best out there on the subject of ripping DVDs. THANKS!!)

Toni said on : January 25th, 2010 at 11:17 am

I’d like to follow-up on Joy Smith’s comment…I used DVDFab to rip to my PC. Is there any way to burn onto a DVD using the same program so that it will play in a DVD player?

Thanks for the great site. EASY and helpful!

bboar01 said on : January 26th, 2010 at 7:25 pm

Any suggestions on foreign dvds that have multiple animation/video feeds. I’m tryin’ a number of different softwares but have yet to get through a dvd smoothly if at all. I reference a movie like Meet the Robinson. Order it from Europe for the Portuguese. However, aside from different audio tracks, it actually has animation bits in adition to english so that text matches the foreign language. This makes for a studder in the video as it plays the same few moments over and over through the diff languages. Anybody know how to isolate the video feed or recommend additional steps? If further detail is needed I can provide that as well.

Naman said on : January 28th, 2010 at 1:15 pm

Hi there, this is such good help. Thanks a lot! I have a lot of DVDs to rip to my PC now..

andy tren said on : February 13th, 2010 at 9:07 am

Media Center Windows 7, recorded with subtitle then playback have subtitle well, burned onto dvd under Media Center but disappoint no subtitle how fixing something?

JustForFun said on : February 15th, 2010 at 12:02 pm

Great guide and follow up posts… Thank you!

Benefits to library management – I am considering reducing all the directories and files created after the DVDFab and DVDShrink process down to a single directory (one directory per Movie on my NAS) containing the single DVDShrink consolidated VOB.

I rip the Mainmovie only (DVDFab) and have not seen the value in storing all the iso files, the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS directories as the single consolidated DVDShrink outputed VOB (which I rename to the movie title and have been changing the ext from VOB to MPG but really dont need to change the extension as the PS3 plays VOB’s) does the job and keeps my storage down to a single 4mb movie.

Any thoughts as I dont care about having scene selection or any of the menu options?

Can anyone help me understand if I will regret this process in the future (deleting the multi-vob outputs from DVD Fab and the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS directories with all the ISO files)?

Kevin Wilson said on : February 22nd, 2010 at 7:56 pm

I would like to find some information….I want to burn my dvd collection (675 movies) to an external hard drive and then be able to play them back on my T.V. is this possible?
Thanks for all the help!!!

Joni said on : March 4th, 2010 at 10:54 am

I tried several ripping programs and had crazy trouble will all, EXCEPT for DVDFAB6. Easy and the copied DVD to DVD, they play on my laptop, DVD player and Xbox. No problems…Thanks for recommending it!

Beck said on : March 15th, 2010 at 10:01 pm

Note that you can rips DVDs using VLC Media Player also. The programs you mentioned are good also. Keep up the great work!

eric carl said on : March 19th, 2010 at 1:38 am

Hi Kevin Wilson

Yes it’s very possible …. first get handbrake ( its free) use this to coppy and shrink your dvd in one step .I’ve been using MP4 format and puting all my movies (1121 in all ) on to a 2TB hard drive .. each movie is only about 1G .. now that you have your movie on your hard drive your going to need a media center.. cheap about $100 at besy buy .. i have a WD media center .it even has a remote to use with it . it hooks up to the tv via HDMI or any other cables that you would use to hook up a dvd player …

Thats it done hope it works for you . it does take time to rip all of them .. about 35min per movie but in the long run it’ll be nice to get rid of all the dvd’s taking up space … drop me a line if you need any help or want to trade movies.

mtz berto said on : March 30th, 2010 at 8:02 am

what software do you recommended for storing music and videos on a PC?

Kelly said on : April 23rd, 2010 at 9:57 am

This is cool. I never thought that my external hard drive was for backing up my files only. Anyway, I’m doing this now. Oh, and one more thing, if I format the hard drive, would the DVDs I ripped disappear, too?

Ryan said on : June 2nd, 2010 at 4:08 am

Hi I own alot of DVD’s of alot of series, and frankly I cant be bothered ripping them all one by one. Is there a way that one can do them simultaneously with the same software if they have multiple DVD drives?

Tayla said on : June 11th, 2010 at 2:42 am

I have a mac computer and it has handbrake on it. Whenever i use handbrake though the icons that are supposed 2 say start and source and etc are all gone so i cant encode my dvd movies how do i fix it?

Martin said on : June 15th, 2010 at 10:50 am

Can I rip and shrink a six hour DVD with these programs?

joe S, said on : June 17th, 2010 at 3:16 pm

I tried your link up top. It didn’t work. I’d like to take some of the movies I have with me. I just bought this computer and am only familiar with some of the new stuff.

What can you tell me?

Kevin said on : July 8th, 2010 at 9:23 am

Hi.

I followed every step in this guide and used HandBrake. Whenever I go to play the DVD, it always comes out all pixelated. The audio is fine, but the video is terrible. Is there something I should be aware of to make the video clear?

Thanks!

Nympheel said on : July 26th, 2010 at 7:09 am

Dear Lance:

Thank you very much for your step-by-step tutorial!

I wonder how much time do you usually take to rip one DVD disc (say 4.7 GB) per your method. Would you kindly please share this experience with us?

Philippe Coles said on : July 26th, 2010 at 3:38 pm

I have a DVD collection of about 1500. I would like to copy them to a drive. I would also like to use Apple TV to play them back on my TV. Is there an efficient way of copying that many DVDs to the drive? Also, how do you get the movie info (tags) without having to manually enter the title, actors, etc., so that it is categorized within the Apple TV interface or any other interface such as FrontRow?

Thanks for the help.

Nobbygrub said on : September 3rd, 2010 at 2:42 pm

Hi,
I am looking for a program where I can burn my DVD’s to my computer reasonably quickly, store them on computor during day and then at night download the whole lot to an external hard drive.
Any ideas?

arlexia said on : October 29th, 2010 at 3:07 pm

Hi

I am needing some help. I have dvdfad to rip my movies. But what i want to know is if I will be able to play them on my external hardrive that i plug in to my ps3.I cant quite figure out how to convert the ripped files to play on it. Any suggestions would be great thank u

Set affinity for a program via Task Manager in Windows XP Says:

[...] example, let’s say you like to rip DVDs, convert the DVD to iPod, PSP, AVI, etc, and re-burn them. That’s probably going to eat a lot of [...]
September 18th, 2008 at 5:39 am

How to rip DVDs to your hard drive

What You’ll Need

DVD Ripping Software

Hardware For Ripping DVDs

Playing Your DVDs

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