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I recently praised the merits of Picasa as a digital archiving tool for your images and photos, creating an organized and elegant image library. This, to me, illustrated how creating digital copies of all of your media is an excellent way to preserve the streamlined and organized feeling of having your films, photos and music in one place. This week we’ll discuss the process of ripping movies to your computer for easy viewing and storage.
My preferred program for digitally archiving my DVD collection is Magic DVD Ripper, now with a full-functional trail, which is good for three Conversions or Backups.
Though the program looks intimidating upon opening for the casual user, the process of ripping a DVD to your storage drive is surprisingly simple. For the purposes of this article, I popped in Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle to put the program through its paces and get a feel for how long the burning process takes.
Opening the program once the movie is in the drive opens the film’s information into the “Source” bar. The default “Title” and “Audio” inputs are the synched full length video and audio, which will copy the full movie to your hard drive without any fiddling with the settings.
The output bars determine what file type your movie is being converted to. I selected .avi, which is a high-quality audio/visual file type. Also available are .wmv (Windows Media), and MPEG-4, recognized by iTunes and iPods.
The split mode bar determines how your new file will be saved. It can be condensed to an 80 minute DataCD, split into chapters or saved as one large file (the ‘infinite’ setting, which functions as the default).
Once all the settings are modified to one’s preference, all that remains is to select a destination for the ripped file. I chose store my digital media on my external drive to put less strain on my aging laptop.
Clicking start will begin the burning and ripping process. The program runs in the background and can be minimized without noticeably affecting system performance. Harold and Kumar, a 90 minute film, clocked in at just over an hour of ripping, at 1:01:38 on the clock, which estimates how much time is left in the burning process as well as how much time has elapsed.
The full version of the Magic DVD Ripper is available for $34.97 on the developer’s wesbite. I encourage everyone to use the trial software and appreciate creating their own digital DVD library.
Next week, I’ll discuss a program that converts almost any video file into a high-quality MPEG-4 for easily accessing your videos through iTunes and even putting them onto an iPod.
Sound Off
Last post: Sep. 27, 2009 at 11:22 am
Nikki (Nikki Blight) said on Nov. 21, 2008 at 1:50 pm:
Quoth Jeff Brandt:
Yeah, because watching movies on your computer instead of on your TV is a great experience . . .
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Agreed... While having music in a convenient digital format is extremely useful, I'd just as soon pop the DVD into my player and watch a movie sprawled on my couch than sit in front of my computer. I just don't see the appeal.
Plus, unless you have an ungodly amount of storage space, you're going to have to sacrifice video quality in favor of file size if you plan to store you entire collection. The biggest drive I currently own is a mere 120GB, and wouldn't even come close to holding my entire movie collection at full quality (each movie is easily 700MB a pop... and I've bought a lot of movies over the years).
DVD ripping is really only useful if you plan to burn the movie afterwards, and burning a second disc when you already own the original seems a little silly.
James (James Hamilton) said on Dec. 3, 2008 at 8:27 pm:
I disagree. I use a program called HandBrake, that's FREE, and it converts my DVDs to any format I want. Though I admit it doesn't work 100% of the time. I choose MPEG-4 so I can watch them on my big-screen through my Xbox360. It's also a good quality-to-file-size-ratio. I just plug the external drive I have my media on into the Xbox's USB port and I have my entire DVD library available via remote control (minus the annoying previews, ads, warnings, and disclaimers)!
The drawbacks are I have to name every file the program spits out, which can more than 50 for a DVD with lots of special features, previews, and other stuff. Also I can't identify which Titles are content I want and which are garbage; I have to transcode them all. The video quality is a bit lower, but that doesn't bother me.
I should also say I own a 1TB external drive too (they're not that expensive Nikki :-)
ReadytoDownload.com (jackie lee) said on Feb. 22, 2009 at 7:59 pm:
this program is really good, thanks
xyzlxj (unregistered user) said on Jul. 6, 2009 at 7:39 pm:
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http://www.daniusoft.org/xproduct/daniusoft-dvd-ripper.html
Jeff Brandt (Jeff Brandt) said on Nov. 21, 2008 at 11:32 am:
Yeah, because watching movies on your computer instead of on your TV is a great experience . . .