There are endless reasons why you might want to rip and convert a movie from a DVD and store it on your computer. You might want to watch a new DVD on your iPad or tablet (which do not have DVD drives); you might just want to backup your expensive movie collection; another reason might be that your DVD collection is bulging and you want to free up some room in your house (a terabyte hard drive full of movies could save a huge amount of cubic meters in your house). Anyway…enough rambling on about why you might want to do it, here's what we think is the best way to go about ripping DVDs to your computer.
Here's how you can rip a DVD in five simple steps
Step one:
Download a DVD ripping program. There are hundreds of these programs available for download on the internet, some will require you to pay for them, some won't. We've found a tested a program called DVD Shrink, this is free and easy to use.
Step two:
Once you have installed DVD Shrink, click on the 'Open Disc' icon near the top rleft of the window, then ensure you have selected DVD drive you want to rip the movie from.
Step three:
Before you start ripping a DVD you might want to 'Shrink' the file size of your ripped DVD. The smaller the file, the more the quality will be affected. If you wish to do this, click on 'Edit' > 'Preferences' and in the drop down box on the new window select 'Custom' and then enter your desired file size.
Step four:
To avoid ripping unwanted DVD titles of trailers to your storage device, click on 'Re-authoer' at the top of the window, then open the 'DVD Browser' tab, after that you need to locate and select the file that is the biggest. This will more often than not be the movie/content you are looking for. If you are unsure, you can preview the file in the bottom left of the screen.
Step five:
Click on the 'Backup!' button at the top of the window. A new sub-window will then open asking you where you want to save the file. Once you have chosen the file's destination, click 'Ok' and DVD Shrink will start to rip the content on your DVD. A normall DVD should take between 30-50 minutes to rip.
