Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Software, Video, Odds and ends
RipIt yanks your DVDs right off the disc
HandBrake handles most of my DVD-ripping responsibilities just fine, but RipIt came to our attention recently, and as a simple one-touch way to get a movie off of a DVD and on to your hard drive (in order to, say, watch it on a laptop without lugging the disc itself along), it looks pretty simple. In fact, it's about as cake as these things get: load up the app, throw a disc in your drive, and press Rip -- a few minutes later (a 7.9gb rip took about 30 minutes for me), you've got a DVDPlayerMedia file on your hard drive to watch at your leisure.
It's $18.99, which is pricey, especially (again) compared to HandBrake, which is conveniently open source, and provides tons more ways to rip things. But if you do a lot of movie ripping and want to have one single button rather than worrying about formats or encoding, that $19 might be well spent.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Branden said 7:22AM on 10-16-2008
This is pretty, but mac-the-ripper does the same thing and it is free. Just put the file it makes into your movies folder, run Front Row and it will play just like a regular DVD in your disk drive, presto!
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matthew said 8:06AM on 10-16-2008
Yeah I don't quite get the appeal either. I've been using MacTheRipper for years quite happily for free. And MTR can also remove region and menu limitations if you want.
nixta said 9:00AM on 10-16-2008
No one ever seems to talk about Fairmount: http://www.metakine.com/products/fairmount/
I gave up on MacTheRipper a long time ago. It's just too tricky (and tricky is most definitely the word, if you're not willing to use "suspect" or "criminal") to get fresh versions/support, and frankly I wouldn't trust the developer with my old toenail scraps.
Fairmount rules for me (you *do* have to have VLC installed as it uses its deCSS routines to sidestep legal issues). It's about as fast as MacTheRipper. As with all DVD rippers, there are some DVDs that it won't handle, but so far everything it's failed on MacTheRipper has failed on too. In most cases, using an external DVD drive resolved that.
And what is a "DVDPlayerMedia" file?
William Hook said 7:53AM on 10-16-2008
+1 for MacTheRipper. It's free, slightly uglier, but just as good. Plus it has a few other tiny tweaks if you need them. :)
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Ian Littman said 12:21PM on 10-16-2008
Another vote for MacTheRipper. MacTheRipper + Handbrake = awesome DVD ripping abilities, for free. Even the default settings for Handbrake do fine, so it isn't that hard...
ThatGuy said 8:05AM on 10-16-2008
Thank god somebody else has come along...the tyrannical way the MacTheRipper author runs things (dont dare say anything bad about it...you will get blocked form using it) and the crazy 'gift' procedure + update procedure can now be gotten available.
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Jason said 8:56AM on 10-16-2008
Man, I hope this thing is the answer to running AnyDVD under Fusion. Nothing I've tried can touch AnyDVD (on either Mac or PC) but I'd love not to have to switch back and forth for that one single app.
gadgetdon said 8:01AM on 10-16-2008
The next version of Handbrake won't do any ripping at all, so you'll need software for pre-ripping.
The publicly available version of MacTheRipper won't work on a lot of modern disks, and the "beta" of MTR requires a mandatory "donation" to get into it, and an increasingly onerous set of bells and whistles to jump through for each release.
If RipIt keeps updating as new protections are added to DVDs, it'll be money well spent.
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totoro said 3:05PM on 10-16-2008
wha? I had heard Handbrake was ADDING conversion for non-DVD sources, I didn't know they were REMOVING DVD ripping. That is disappointing!
gadgetdon said 3:25PM on 10-16-2008
Handbrake will rip directly from unprotected DVDs...which means no commercial DVDs. What this does is pull Handbrake completely out of the shadow, remove any concerns about DMCA implications, and that sort of thing. I'm guessing that a lawyer or someone suggested they do this to avoid other problems.
BTW, a "DVDPlayerMedia" is what's called a Package, which is a folder specially flagged so the Finder treats it as a file. You can right click on it, and you'll see the same folder created by Mac The Ripper. The Mac DVD player is set to recognize these packages, so double-clicking one launches the player and plays. Handbrake also can deal with it.
So far, I've used it to rip four DVDs. No problems at all.
John Williams said 8:04AM on 10-16-2008
Speaking of ripping, these guys ripped off the look and feel of Disco (www.discoapp.com) pretty unabashedly. Even down to their site design and url name.
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Peter Zich said 8:55AM on 10-16-2008
Yeah, I recommend MacTheRipper.
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joshua said 9:01AM on 10-16-2008
haha, why does this post have jurrasic park tags? "hold on to your butts."
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steve said 9:13AM on 10-16-2008
Another MacTheRipper fanboy here. Even works well with older Macs.
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Anonymous said 10:18AM on 10-16-2008
So let's of comments about other apps, but what about those that have actually used RipIt? I just downloaded the trial, though I'm at work w/o a DVD movie to test it. 30 minutes for a DVD movie seems pretty adequate, but what the spec's/quality of the resulting movie? Is it single pass or dual pass? How 'bout the audio? What's the final size of the ripped movie? Most tools will make the movie just slightly smaller than 700Mb for transportation on a CD. Most default to single pass on the video and fail to use lossless on the audio. But most alternatives also allow you to tweak these settings... at the expense of time and disk space, but at the benefit of a higher quality rip. Most will also let you change aspect ratio's. RipIt seems to have no options along these lines, leaving you to wonder what its output results will be. And what codec does it use? Is it xvid, divx, or some Quicktime happy format?
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SPower said 10:26AM on 10-16-2008
One comment said this copies Disco, another said that if they update RipIt often it will be money well spent.
If this app really copies Disco, the developers will take everyone's money and never update the app again, despite heavily promoting all the new features they are working on for 2.0 at the 1.0 release.
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Omy said 1:13AM on 11-26-2008
Disco and RipIt are owned by the same company. Do some research before making defamatory comments.
ZX said 10:29AM on 10-16-2008
They could be the same people behind Disco...you know, that hit & run app!
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Enigmafan420 said 10:40AM on 10-16-2008
I gotta agree with the Comment about AnyDVD. I also use Clone DVD with it-NOTHING I have tried either in Windows or OS-X comes close.
I am really wanting to find a Mac equivalent, but so far, nothing. AnyDVD is about the only reason I use bootcamp anymore :) Have never tried it using parallels-afraid too much overhead for my lowly 3GB Mac Mini.
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Dave Martorana said 10:53AM on 10-16-2008
FULL DISCLOSURE: I know, am friends with, and write software with the developer of RipIt.
@Anonymous - this is a full, bit-for-bit, minus copy protection copy of the DVD. This means everything is as lossless as it is on the DVD itself. Now, this does come at the expense of space - from 4-7+ gig of space per movie. That can easily be transcoded down in size after the ripping process is complete.
I can tell you this - every single DVD that is reported as not working (which is down to about 8 in close to 11,000 unique DVDs and hundreds of thousands of rips so far) is hunted down, purchased, and made to work. The release notes in each release of RipIt, which come out about once a month or so, contain a list of each reportedly broken disc which now rips just fine.
@John Williams - the app uses Core Animation for the UI and visual effects. A disc can only look so many ways on an app, and ripping off the look and feel of Disco never crossed our minds - and we're heavy users of Disco. The background is black and the disc does spin, but what else were we supposed to do? :)
Also, putting "app" at the end of a URL is relatively standard in Mac software development, and is not a rip off of Disco's URL. That's just silly.
I'd be happy to answer any straight questions anyone has. There IS a free trial, that is unencumbered, minus a time limit (7 days). So give it a try! Happy ripping!
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