Best DVD to mac software.

[mpt-matthew]

Firstly i dont want to do this to be illegal, i own the DVDs its just easier if they are on my Mac (and then perhaps apple peripherals, like iPhone or iPad).

Looked around for software, and there seems to be a good amount, so anyone know which is best.
I dont mind paying a bit, if there is no decent free option.
It will need to cope with copy with copy protected DVDs

I also want it DVD quality, full quality to watch on my mac (no downsizing etc preferably). (can iTunes handle the downsize for iPhone?)

PS Im in the UK, so my DVDs are PAL (if this makes a difference).

THANKS

 

[spinnerlys]

1. How to copy (rip) the content of video DVDs to your HDD​

As commercial video DVDs use a copy protection scheme called CSS (Content Scramble System), additional software is needed to copy the content of a video DVD to your HDD, which is called "ripping". There are several applications to accomplish this. You can use Mac OS X' DVD Player application or the VLC Player to play back the ripped content stored inside the VIDEO_TS folder without further transcoding.​

1.1. MacTheRipper 2.6.6 (free)

Insert the video DVD into your DVD drive and open MacTheRipper and click the GO button, after which you can select the place you want the video DVD's content saved to.
As this version of MTR is quite old, it will not read many modern DVDs.​

1.2. RipIt (19.95 USD, trial with 10 rips free)

Insert the video DVD and press the RIP button.​

1.3. Fairmount (free) - needs VLC 32-bit to decrypt the CSS (thanks to Satori for that information)​

1.4. Mac DVDRipper Pro (9.95 USD)

Insert the video DVD and select a destination folder, then press the RIP button.​

2. How to transcode the MPEG-2 encoded video DVD material for use on your computer after you ripped the video DVD.​

As video DVDs take up a lot of space (up to 8GB), one can transcode (changing the format and encoding) the MPEG-2 encoded video into MPEG-4 encoded video via Handbrake, which might only take 1GB of HDD capacity away, while still looking good.

Handbrake currently offers to read VIDEO_TS folders, the folder on the video DVD with all the material (menus, video and audio) inside, and transcode the footage to something smaller. Currently variants of the space efficient and highly qualitative MPEG-4 codec are used, H264 or Xvid for example.
The current version of Handbrake offers two container formats, .mkv and .mp4, older versions also had the .avi container to transcode to.
.mkv and .mp4 containers accept the H264 codec, also used for the QuickTime trailers on Apple's Trailer page.
Handbrake also offers PRESETS for you to choose from. There are for the AppleTV, iPhone and iPod Touch, iPod and some more.

For more information about properly using Handbrake, either go to the Handbrake Community, read the Handbrake Guide or use MRoogle to find dozens upon dozens of threads about this.​

3. How to transcode the MPEG-2 encoded video DVD material for use on your computer without ripping the video DVD.​

If you don't want to rip the video DVDs first, and just use Handbrake for transcoding the video, make sure to install VLC Player to circumvent the CSS I mentioned earlier.
Make sure you have the 64-bit version of both applications installed, or the 32-bit versions. Both applications will not work together, if one is 32-bit and one is 64-bit.

VLC Player 64-bit (VLC 1.1.0) - VLC Player 32-bit (1.0.5 and lower)

Handbrake 64-bit Intel, 32-bit Intel and 32-bit PPC on this page, so choose the right one
​

Also of interest: How-To: Automating DVD & Blu-Ray (Backup, Encoding & Tagging) for Mac OS X 10.6

 

[mpt-matthew]

1. How to copy (rip) the content of video DVDs to your HDD​

...

THANKS, works great (using 64bit), on my itunes now, not tried putting them onto my iPhone, but after some settings tweaks got good quality for under 4GB.

thanks

 

[spinnerlys]

THANKS, works great (using 64bit), on my itunes now, not tried putting them onto my iPhone, but after some settings tweaks got good quality for under 4GB.

thanks

You can get good quality for a 90 min film in SD resolution with 1GB and less.

 

[mpt-matthew]

You can get good quality for a 90 min film in SD resolution with 1GB and less.

Haha, ill keep trying, but i dont mind using a few gigs for a bit of quality.
But i was shocked when my first film came to 24GB (something to do with large file 64bit stuff), it was turned off quickly.

 

[123walter]

DVD to pod

Anydvdconverter is pretty good. Altho it seems to have problems occasionally with copy protection. The best I have ever seen is unfortunately a windows program called dvdfab.

 

[The.316]

RipIt, Mactheripper, and Handbrake are the three best programs for me.

 

[tpg]

I use RipIt. Can say 100% it will work with PAL DVDs in the UK, and I have yet to come across a disc that it cannot rip successfully.

I avoided mactheripper after hearing very strange things about how you have to buy it...

As for encoding, I just leave them uncompressed, so that tends to be about 7GB per disc. The great thing is that it will preserve the entire menu structure and extra features too, and you can even burn a backup using something like toast if you break your original disc (minus CSS and other copy-protection schemes)