Hey all,

I want to rip my dvds to be played on my computer only. I'm not worried about making backup copies, I just want to be able to watch them on trips etc...

What is a good, free and hopefully fast way to do this?

I have a laptop- 1.5GHz Pentium M with 240 MB RAM running XP Home

thanks

If you want to save some space, you can also try DVD Shrink

thanks dude!

Without a doubt, FairUse. It used to be free, but it's worth the small fee. It has tons of options to play with to get it to whatever quality/file size you want. I've found that around 10MB per minute is a good trade-off. It results in an average of about 1GB per movie, but that's not too bad. And I think that's a good plan of yours. You'll probably save a bit of battery power playing these off the hard disk than constant spinning of the DVDROM.

In general the ones that transcode a DVD to Divx are likely to shorten the battery life. The optical disc isn't spinning, but the tradeoff is the CPU (and possibly the GPU is it has decoding features) works harder and draws more power.

Do some benchmarks of your own to see what works best, keeping in mind the platform the system sits on should be identical for the tests due to heat managment, and a fan possibly draining more power.

Ah. I had wondered what the tradeoff was in those terms. I figured the physical mechanics would require more battery than the graphics processing. Doesn't the machine have to do that anyway for the DVDs?

And now that I look at your post, it looks like you're talking about the process of actually ripping and encoding the movies in terms of battery power. I'm just talking about playing a divx AVI versus playing a DVD.

Regardless, I think that FairUse program does the best job, which is what the original post was about anyway

Rob, will DVDShrink really do what he's asking for? I didn't think it did any transcoding, just compression of MPEG2, and even then just the elemental streams.

*edit*
Oh, and I should mention that as far as your "fast" requirement goes, I'm sorry to say that it's unlikely. Unless you have a pretty blazing machine, you're definitely not going to get fast speeds (unless several hours is fast to you). If you're doing it on that laptop you mentioned, it's going to take quite a while. My machine has an Athlon 2100+, and I rip and compress a movie with DVDShrink in over 3 hours, and rip and encode a movie in FairUse in over 5!

To conserve space I'd recommend FairUse as well. Great little program; well worth the $2. All the suggestions are great programs; I use them all.

Edit: Oh, it's not $2 any longer. Regardless, it's well worth it.

I was actually talking about the needed processing power to play back a Divx movie file compared to a DVD file. DVDs are MPEG2 and require less processing power to decode then Divx (basicially MPEG4). For example, the Farscape miniseries I am watching now takes 5-15% of the CPU to play back. It's an MPEG2 file off my ReplayTV. A Divx file I have from a DVD takes 15-30% of the CPU. Not a huge increase, but on a slower processor the difference will be more noticeable. It all depends on the system for how much power will be lost to decode compared to spinning a DVD. Modern laptops normally are able to downclock the CPU, and system bus to save power and quickly change depending on what the user does.

Ah, I appologize. But I still don't understand what you were meaning in the first line of your post.

Quote:
In general the ones that transcode a DVD to Divx are likely to shorten the battery life.

You mean the programs, right? I thought you were discussing how the programs shortened battery life instead of the different ways of watching the movies.

I'm not terribly worried about battery life and all that. Most of the time I can plug the laptop into the car or a hotel.

However, I was hoping to find a program that would create a divx or avi file or whatever that would be a gig or less, so I could bring 20 or 30 movies with me at a time. I dont need all the extras or stuff like that in the movie, and I dont need surround sound either.

I used dvdshrink and it worked great and didnt take that long, its just not what I was looking for.

Any other ideas for programs I could use?

Like I said, FairUse can get it to whatever size you want. Most of the movies I've transcoded with it have been just around a gig, and I could make them smaller.

Give it a try. There's an evaluation copy.

*edit*
Oh, and all the files it makes are AVIs. You have a choice as to whether you encode it as a DiVX file or XViD. I prefer the latter.

Will any of these ripp DVD's to mpe avi I would like to ripp my futurama season 3 and 4 to Qvga and Put them on my Ipaq for those long meetings.

Ok, I've tried FairUse and here is my review: Meh.

It's definately a powerful program, but the ease of use is lacking as far as I'm concerned. Even the "full auto" mode is a bit clumsy. Plus if you run out of HD space the program keeps running for the full 2 hours or whatever, instead of stopping and telling you, and you end up with a nothing file after 5 hours.

I dunno, it's ok I guess. It does what I need it to do, but I was hoping for a program that was more "one click" friendly. I suppose I sound like an idiot complaining that a program gives me too many choices, but the interface needs to be more intuitive and obvious. Oh, and the error correction is non-existant, another contention for me as my dvds are not all perfect. Oh well.

I now have more ripping experience than I did. DVDBackup for the Mac couldn't help, so I used DVD Decrypter in a Windows (VirtualPC) machine to do it.

http://www.doom9.org/dvd_ripper_comparison.htm explains why; Basically "The Man with the Golden Gun" was mismastered.

A good free one I use from time to time is Handbrake. It's only out for BeOS, MacOS, and Linux though, not Windows.

I was going to use it to store movies for my Europe trip, but forgot about it till it was too late. Next big vacation though I should be ready with movies to play off my hard drive and not a DVD disc.

It converts to MPEG 4, I only wanted to rip and decode.