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.
There are several methods for ripping your DVDs on your Windows computer, but lets run down a couple of the best below.
Rip DVDs in One-Click with DVD Rip and DVD Shrink
Our first and favorite option for ripping DVDs to your hard drive is DVD Rip
DVD Rip works in conjunction with another tool called DVD Shrink, a freeware application that rips and compresses the DVD image. DVD Shrink does all the heavy lifting—DVD Rip just makes it super-simple to use.
Our first and favorite option for ripping DVDs to your hard drive is DVD Rip, a free, open source application built in the Lifehacker workshop designed to make backing up DVDs to your hard drive as simple as possible. DVD Rip works in conjunction with another tool called DVD Shrink, a freeware application that rips and compresses the DVD image.
DVD Rip is also designed to work well with DVD Play
DVD Shrink can break the copy protection on most DVDs without issue, but if you're having a problem, try running previously mentioned DVD43, which promises to remove copy protection from virtually any DVD, before you start DVD Shrink.
Play Back Ripped DVDs with DVD Play and VLC
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
Burn Your Backups to a New DVD with ImgBurn
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.
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.
Check out strider_mt2k's post. I haven't used it yet, but I plan on trying it out now.
I have been using DVD43 ([www.dvd43.com]) to disable the encryption on the DVD then use LCISO Creator ([www.lucersoft.com]) to rip my DVD as .ISO files.
Once you've ripped the DVD to an ISO, you can use Handbrake to re-encode the DVD video. Output to h.264, Mpeg-4, etc.
There are free plugins available for Media Center that offer much more features than the built in DVD Library such as MyMovies ([www.mymovies.dk]) and Sam's Video Browser ([www.samsaffron.com]).
There are free plugins available for Media Center that offer much more features than the built in DVD Library such as MyMovies ([www.mymovies.dk]) and Sam's Video Browser ([www.samsaffron.com]).
I've been using the dvd43 and dvd shrink combo to actually directly export and burn to a blank dvd. There is an option to do that rather than copying onto the HD.
DVD Shrink should be left in Full Disc mode and you should replace all unneeded video segments with "still images" or "static image" (i think its called) in order to increase the main movie resolution.
If you've found some newer disks that you're having trouble ripping correctly, read about Ripit4Me here: [www.videohelp.com]
