RipLock on MacBooks

I know there have been threads on this in the past, but I didn't want to bump some oldies...so here we go.

Has anybody had any success bypassing the RipLock technology it seems Apple employs on their SuperDrives?

My Unibody has the UJ-868 drive, which rips music nice and fast, but when it comes to DVD ripping (not even commercial DVDs, but home recordings and whatnot) it will take ~1/2 the play time of the disc to rip. With my old PC laptop and Dell tower it would do a complete movie in like 15min, tops.

The only think I can think of is the use of RipLock technology. It doesn't matter if I'm using MacTheRipper or just drag-and-dropping the Video_TS folder either.

I figure I can always give Apple a call at some point, but I don't think I'll get too far with their customer support when it comes to what is most likely a firmware issue. My hope is that there's a software solution that can trick the drive in to thinking it's not ripping video files, but I haven't found anything of the sort yet....

Worst case, I guess I could pick up a USB enclosure and make my old Dell's 48x DVD-ROM drive my dedicated external ripping drive, but I was hoping to do this without external add-ons like that!

I see there were 89 views but no replies so I may as well update...

I ended up just going to Fry's and getting a SATA/IDE-->USB2.0 port adapter for $15. No enclosure, just a 120V-->Molex plug and an SATA+IDE port-->USB port converter.

Works like a charm, 16min to extract a full 4.7GB video DVD, about an hour with the internal drive....

Richard1028 said:

I didn't know they had that built into the SuperDrive?

I wonder why I don't have this problem running Windows via Parallels? (Using AnyDVD for encrypted videos).

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From reading around, it's been on the SuperDrives for quite some time. I'm not sure if it's OS dependent, but like I said audio rips up to 15x speed with a good disc no problem.

The $15 external setup is fantastic in terms of speed, just a couple extra cables too. The RipLock doesn't prevent you from ripping DVDs, it just slows down the speed to what seems like ~2.4x maximum speed. How long does it take you to rip an entire feature length DVD via Parallels?

Richard1028 said:

A 90 minute DVD will take about 45-55 minutes. About the same as on my Dell desktop.

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See, that's the RipLock in action. On a DVD drive without RipLock it'll take 15min or so for a 90min disc to rip/extract. That's what I'm getting with my old 48x CD/16x DVD drive from 2002 out of my old Dell tower with the IDE-->USB adapter.

If you're encoding while extracting, that's a different story, but just for ripping >20minutes per 90minutes of video is too long IMO. I knew something was up with the MacBooks because I was ripping DVDs on that Dell back in 2003 and the extraction would never take more than 15-20min. Encoding would take some time depending on the codec and the encoder, but that's a CPU related issue which is independent of the optical drive here. I like to rip to the HDD first, then encode the files.