Rip DVD's To Your Computer

At some point, you're going to want to put movies onto your mobile device, whether it's an iPod, iPad, iPhone or Android device.  With screens becoming higher and higher resolution, they're just begging to be made into your own personal movie theater.  The question is how does one start with a DVD and end up with a file on your portable device?  There are a few steps involved here so we're going to start off with the first phase...getting the movie from your DVD onto your computer.

For this lesson, I'm going to be teaching you how to use VLC to rip the DVD's.  VLC is a media player application for Mac and PC that is completely free.  It's a very robust program that can play just about any file you can think of.  There are other programs out there that can probably rip movies a little faster or with one or two fewer steps, but I'm starting with VLC since it's available for multiple computer systems and most importantly...it's free!  We love free things!

Download VLC onto your computer from here.... VideoLan.org

Open the file and go through the appropriate steps as it prompts you to install the program on either your Mac or PC.  For the sake of this demonstration I'm going to be doing this on the Mac version but it should be essentially the same as PC.  If you have any questions as you follow along on the PC version, drop a comment below and I'll walk you through it.

Now you have VLC installed on your computer.  Go ahead and put a DVD into your computers disk drive.  Open the VLC program and click on the File Menu, then select Open Disc.

Now we're going to change a few quick settings.  Make sure the DVD check box is selected, and below that check the box that says "No DVD Menus" (we're just ripping the movie, not the menus).  For Device Name, that should be your DVD drive.  If it doesn't fill in automatically, you'll have to click the drop down menu and select the drive you want.  In the box marked "Title" make sure that you put "0" (the number zero, not the letter o).

Now below all of that, click the box that says Streaming/Saving.  This will enable the button on the right labeled "Settings."  Click on that.

Now we have some more settings to adjust.  The first line says "Display Screen Locally" and has a check box.  If you select that box, you can watch the movie play as it is ripping it.  Generally, this program is very slow and takes just about as long as it would take to watch the movie, but leaving this unchecked will make it just slightly faster.

In the file box, type in the location and file name you want the video saved under.  I usually make a folder in my Documents folder called Converted Movies and save all of them there, but you can put it wherever you like.  Just remember where you put it so you can find it later.

Next, for Encapsulation Method we're going to select MPEG 4 from the drop down menu.  This is the file most commonly read by most mobile devices.  Below that, under Transcoding Options, set it up as I have in the picture.  Video should be mp4v and Audio should be mp4a.  The Bitrates have to do with the amount of data in the video file.  The higher the Bitrate, the bigger the file and the higher quality the image and sound.  I find that 1024 is a good compromise of picture quality and file size.  Feel free to experiment with different settings if you like.



And that's it.  Click OK then Click Open on the next screen and you should see the VLC player start playing the DVD.  It will look like the DVD is just playing but it's actually ripping the movie.  It will take just about as long to rip it as it would to just play the movie, so now would be a good time to go grab a bite to eat, take a nap, or better yet...tell all your friends about how cool HackMondo is!  (Shameless plug...sorry)

Like I said, there are faster programs out there but most of them would require you to part with your hard earned dineros and that's something we're trying to avoid.  In the next part of this series, we're going to start looking at transferring this new video file onto your mobile device using programs like iTunes, DoubleTwist and even just doing it manually!  I know...we're getting crazy!