DVD Ripping was never So easy!! - Electronic Gurudev

October 31, 2011 by Anchit Pandey

https://www.electronicgurudev.in/technology/dvd-ripping-was-never-so-easy/

Commercial DVDs are far too expensive to let scratches turn your video into a glorified coaster, but most people still don’t back up their DVD collection. Once upon a time, the four to eight gigabyte footprint of a DVD on your hard drive was prohibitively large. But since the price of a gigabyte has plummeted, ripping your entire DVD collection to your computer is not just possible, it’s prudent—and it’s easy. Let’s take a look at the best ways to back up and play any DVD rip on your home computer, along with how to burn a DVD rip back to a playable DVD.

What You’ll Need

All you need is a PC with a DVD drive and a hard drive with some extra space.

You only need a DVD drive capable of burning DVDs if you want to burn your backups back to a disc you can play in a DVD player.

Set Up Painless DVD Ripping to Your Hard Drive

There are several methods for ripping your DVDs on your Windows computer, but let’s run down a couple of the best below.

Rip DVDs in One-Click with DVD Rip and DVD Shrink

Despite the fact that the freeware DVD Shrink (download) hasn’t been in active development for years, this freeware decrypter, ripper, and compressor is still a favorite all-in-one stop for ripping and backing up DVDs. Its compression feature is what sets DVD Shrink apart, compressing 8GB dual-layer DVDs down to 4GB sizes that will fit on standard, single-layer DVD-Rs (i.e., the type of DVDs most consumers can burn to).

NOTE: DVD Shrink can break the copy protection on most DVDs without issue, but if you’re having a problem, try running DVD43, which promises to remove copy protection from virtually any DVD, before you start DVD Shrink.

DVDFab HD Decrypter

Like DVD Shrink, DVDFab HD Decrypter breaks copy protection and rips the DVD contents to your hard drive. Unlike DVD Shrink, DVDFab does not compress the rip, so it’s going to be the same quality as the original. DVDFab is actually a shareware app, but the trial version does full DVD rips and will even rip only the main movie.

Pros: DVDFab has a great reputation for cutting through copy protection, and it results in full quality rips.

Cons: Full quality rips mean lots of hard drive space per movie—around 8GB. If that’s not a problem, more power to the full rip. If it is, DVD Shrink (with or without DVD Rip) will half that to about 4 or 5GB and might be more your taste. You might also consider ripping just the main movie with DVDFab if you don’t want or need the extra features to save space.

Play Back Your Rips

Now that you’ve set up your computer to inhale any and every DVD you throw its way, you want to play these ripped DVDs. You could go one step further and encode them to popular compressed formats like DivX, but the rips you’ve already set up have their own charm for a couple of reasons.

First, ripping DVDs to the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders (the default output for these methods) means you retain the entire DVD structure, so watching the rip works just like if you were watching the DVD, complete with menus and special features. Second, these folders can easily be burned back to DVDs so that—in the event that one of your physical discs is damaged—you can just burn the backup and never miss a beat. Here are a few methods and apps you can use to play back these DVDs on your computer and burn new DVDs from the rips.

Play Back Ripped DVDs with DVD Play and VLC

VLC helps you to navigate and play back your ripped DVDs. All you have to do is point DVD Play at the folder where you’re ripping all of your DVDs, and it provides a nice interface for browsing and playing back those ripped DVDs.

Play Back Ripped DVDs in Windows Media Center

If you’re a Windows Media Center user, you can play back these ripped DVDs from directly within Media Center. In pre-Vista versions of Media Center, you can just add your rips folder to your My Videos library and they’ll automatically show up as playable. The DVD library feature is turned off by default in Vista’s Media Center, but all it takes is one small tweak to enable it.

Burn Your Backups to a New DVD with ImgBurn

Finally, if your physical disc gets damaged, you can always burn a new DVD from your backup (again, with DVD menus and all the extra features). This time, we’re using a freeware application called ImgBurn. To burn one of your backups to a new DVD, just fire up ImgBurn and enter Build mode by selecting Mode -> Build from the ImgBurn menu. Now just click browse folder icon beneath the source dropdown and point ImgBurn to the folder of the ripped DVD you want to burn.

After you’ve selected the folder, insert a blank DVD and then click on ImgBurn’s Calculate button to determine if your DVD has enough space to burn the backup. If you want to back up DVDs you ripped using DVDFab (all 8GBs), you’ll need a dual-layer DVD burner capable of burning to 8GB dual-layer DVDs. If you’ve just got a regular old DVD burner that can only burn to 4GB single-layer discs (which I suspect is most of us), the DVD Shrink method above is your best choice.

Now, assuming you’ve got a DVD big enough to handle your DVD rip, just click the Build button (pictured) and let ‘er burn. Note: If your Build button does not look like the button pictured, you need to switch to Device Output mode by clicking the small button to the left of the Build button to switch to Device Output mode—otherwise ImgBurn will want to create an ISO file on your hard drive rather than burn the disc.

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