Best way to rip DVD's

[kolax]

Something I haven't really bothered about much until now, since my Mac is becoming my primary media device (I have it connected to my tele now). I use Front Row when it is hooked up, and stuff inside the Movies section is located on my external hard drive attached to my Airport Extreme.

I have a load of DVDs I want to rip and put on my external hard drive so I can access all my movies at the click of a button, rather than hunting for the DVD and getting off my arse to put it into the DVD drive.

I have MacTheRipper, but not sure what to do to basically separate the contents of it all and make it a .avi file.

For example, right now I want to rip my Season 1 of the Peep Show. How exactly would I extract the individual episodes from it and make them .avi files?

Cheers!

 

[GSMiller]

I don't think MacTheRipper will rip to .avi, only Video_TS files.

I have been able to rip individual episodes/chapters from DVDs very easily with Handbrake.

 

[ab2650]

what GSMiller said. MTR to remove protection, Handbrake to re-encode to AVI.

 

[kolax]

Handbrake does the job perfectly, cheers!

On the topic of Handbrake, is there a way to select what titles it will do, rather than doing one, waiting until it finishes then doing another? Would be useful for running this through the night.

 

[TheStu]

I would suggest h264 mp4. For the same file size, you get (to my eyes) better video quality. I had my friend do a single blind test with movies he ripped in handbrake on his macbook pro. All were 1.4GB files, done once in 2pass AVI, and then again in 2pass h264 mp4. There were 5 movies in all, and 4 out of the 5 looked significantly better under h264. The fifth it was sort of hard to tell, but the h264 did look a little better IIRC.