All You Need To Know About Ripping DVDs

Ripping your music CDs to MP3 changes everything. Instead of juggling CD cases and spending time hunting through the bookcase for the CD with the one track you really feel like hearing, you can choose from your entire music library and enjoy it instantly on your desktop computer or portable media player. You get your content when, where and how you want it - and making a copy for personal use is generally legally acceptable, so there's plenty of software that can do it for you.

Things are not as simple when it comes to ripping DVDs, however. For one thing, the DVD Video format is more complicated. Each track on a CD is a WAV file that you can copy or convert, but the content of a DVD is divided into multiple VOB files for the video, with separate audio tracks and a menu system. The menus let you navigate through the video scenes and access alternative soundtracks, captions, camera angles, audio commentaries and extra content.

The files involved are much larger, especially on dual-layer DVDs, and the conversion is a more complicated process. Video processing is always a CPU-intensive process; it could take you a full 24 hours to copy a DVD on a 500 MHz PC, while even a 2 GHz processor will take three or four hours to do the job. And while the version you watch on your PC or media player will be a much smaller file than what's on the DVD, you'll still need up to 10 GB of free space for the files.

For commercial DVDs there are other considerations, too: both the copy protection on the discs, and the legality of copying the content (even for personal use). Some of the most famous DVD ripping software is no longer available legally, and not all of the DVD copying software you can buy will work with commercial DVDs.