Ripping My DVD Collection

Handbrake

If your going to pursue this venture, be aware that it may be illegal depending on where you live. If you don't fear the MPAA/whatever-the-heck-your-movie-asscociation-is then read on.

 So, I got this urge the other night to start ripping my DVD collection to my HDD. Needless to say, that they're are literally dozens of tools out they're that allows you to do this. Most famous of all is Handbrake a free, open source program that allows you to rip a DVD in many of the most popular codecs including h.264, Xvid, avi and mp4. The only drag is that the encoding process takes a long time. The shortest time I've had to wait was about 2 hours for The Two Towers. But the movie looks great and I don't need a disc any longer to watch it.
    You will also need a program to crack the CSS encryption (no, that's not Cascading Style Sheets). I recommend DVD 43. It's small and it runs in the background and it's not very annoying. Great little App. Now the GUI for Handbrake can be a tad intimidating, so I'll put a a little guide here to guide you through.
1. Insert a DVD. Make sure DVD 43 is running (you can make sure of this by making sure that the little green smiley face is in the taskbar.
2. Launch Handbrake. When Prompted, select the drive where the DVD is located (must be a DVD Drive) expand the drive and select the Video_TS file. Click Open and click OK.
3. When prompted with the "Reading Disk Data" just click OK, it's normal
4. Click the "Browse Button by the Destination Field. Enter the name of the file and click  Save.
5. You know have a choice of codecs. I use Mp4 but you can use h.264 if you know what your doing.
6. There are more advanced settings that you can be used if you know what you are doing.
7. Click the "Encode Video" Button A little Command Line window will open and start encoding your video. Go and find something else to do because depending on the length and quality settings, it might take a a while.
That's mostly it. You can configure things like cropping, aspect ratio, audio type and things like that. But that's for you adventurous tinkerers that have uber amount of time on your hands.