I recently had the overwhelming desire to rip a DVD to my Macbook for watching on the road. It’s not something I had done before, so I was shocked at how incredibly complicated it can be. Everything I read told me to get Handbrake because it was so simple. After giving it a try, I nearly gave up on the entire project. I sat there after hours of unsuccessful attempts thinking “there has to be an easier way.”Handbrake couldn’t be more complex. Not only are you required to know what terms like bitrate, anamorphic, codec, and framerates are, but you also have to download VLC; another ugly and unnecessarily complex app to actually finish the job.
As it turns out, there is a much easier way to simply make a copy of your commercial DVD. It’s called RipIt from The Little App Factory, and it actually lived-up to it’s claim of being easy – a fact which earned it a Macworld 2009 Editor’s Choice award.
Ok, so it’s not dead simple. You do have to have some knowledge of your Mac to rip a DVD with RipIt. To make it easy, I’ve created an illustrated set of instructions below.
Step 1: Insert DVD. Step 2: Click Rip button. Step 3: Wait. Step 4: Watch your movie.
I would love to give a lengthy review of this app, but quite honestly it simply isn’t necessary. The app does one thing, and works perfectly. You can choose how you want to receive the resulting file(s), a single file viewable with Quicktime, or the required folders to burn a viewable DVD using Toast or other DVD burning app, a few simple quality settings, and a small handful of eye-candy preferences. That’s it. It really couldn’t be any easier than RipIt makes it.
RipIt can be purchased from The Little App Factory for $19.95, and a demo download is available. The developer claims that the app works with over 250,000 commercial DVDs – and even guarantees that if you find one that doesn’t work, they’ll buy the DVD and fix the app. I wish every shareware app I downloaded delivered on their promises like RipIt does.
Is this good for burning DVDs of just regular documents/graphics files as well as movies? I am way behind on burning DVDs of my files. Calculating how long it takes to burn on my mac, it would take me at least 155 hours to do so since every DVD is burned three times for internal/external uses. I’m looking for something much faster. Is this faster than Roxio or the regular Mac burn?
Handbrake is not hard to use wither and it automaticly drops the ripped copy to your desktop and you can put it any where you want from there. drag it in to itunes like I do and it works perfectly with my apple tvs. now there are some dvds that it cant rip for some reason but the last two months i spent backing up my entire dvd system (723 DVDs) and I have only came across 4 dvds that it could not rip (back up). ripit is a good software but there are others out there that work well and cost nothing. now i am not a big fan of mac the ripper it seems to rip a poor quality version 2 out of 5 times which is a pain. handbrake, handbrake, handbrake, that pretty much sums everything up.
Been using mactheripper for this, for the last few years – press a button and off you go… Best of all it’s free 🙂
Thank for this post. I’ve never heard of this application, but I sure do like it now!
I can’t believe I hadn’t come across this app sooner. I love it – well worth the $$
I too, tried Handbrake and also found it very complicated.
I happened upon RipIt and man what a difference! Drag and Drop, that was it! Most rips took 30 min. on my Mac Mini 1.25 MHz PPC. Even copy protected DVDs it handled, well… most of them. And the ones it couldn’t it popped-up a window with the spaces to enter the UPC code (some were auto-inserted!) and name of the disc so they could figure out how to rip it. These rips played flawlessly on the OS X DVD player, which is all that I needed. After 10 rips I will gladly pay me moneys.
love the app. I got mine in a bundle deal, and it’s about the only app I still use.