How to Rip a DVD or Blu-ray Movie

January 14, 2010 By Digital Trends Staff

For DVDs

What You Need

If you’ve ever ripped a music CD, you’ll find that the process of ripping a movie to be only slightly more complicated. Ripping and transcoding a DVD, however, takes more time and a lot more horsepower. You’ll need a fairly current CPU (a dual- or quad-core), a DVD-ROM drive, and some software. DVDs are nearly always copy protected, which means you’ll need a software program capable of breaking that encryption. This is where you turn outlaw, because the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) turns anyone who circumvents copy protection into a bona fide criminal.

But let’s get real. The chances of the Hollywood Gestapo storming your front porch, kicking your door in, and dragging you off to court for copying movies you’ve legitimately purchased for your own personal use are somewhere between slim and none. But if this makes you as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, or if it just bothers your conscience, stop reading now.

Still with us? Great. A program called DVD43 is one of two best programs for defeating DVD copy protection, and it’s free. You can download it from here. Unfortunately, DVD43 isn’t compatible with 64-bit versions of Windows, but there are at least two commercial alternatives: One is AnyDVD, which sells for 49 Euros (about $70 U.S.). You can download a 21-day free trial of this program. The other is called DVDFab DVD to DVD, which sells for about the same price. You can download a 30-day trial of this program here. We’ll be using AnyDVD for this story.

The last piece of software you’ll need does the actually ripping; equally important, however, is its capacity for transcoding. The program is called Handbrake and you can download it for free here. The only other thing you need is a DVD movie. We’re going to use the splendid Paul Thomas Anderson film: Boogie Nights.

One of the reasons ripping DVDs is more complicated than ripping a CD is that movie discs contain more than one type of media—there’s the video, of course, but then there’s the multi-track audio, navigation menus, subtitles, and so on. All this media is wrapped into a special type of file known as a container, and you’ll need to decide which type of container file to create before you rip the DVD. Most people choose either MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 14) or MKV (Matroska Multimedia Container). We’ve chosen MP4 because it’s supported by a wide variety of media players on both the PC and the Mac, as well as most portable players.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed the software described above, you’ll be ready to start ripping.

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Showing 25 comments

Jennifer2012 at 1:14am 17th May 2011 So. once a time. the protected DVD or blu-ray moive can't be ripped because it it protected. Now. with the DVD ripper that can can remove protection on DVD. So you can convert DVD file to video or audio in a few steps and get high resolution movie for other portable devices.
Ryland Jon at 1:03pm 10th March 2011 so, I have read up on this anyDVD HD, but the only question that I have I can't seem to find an answer to: does it remove the copyright protection on the actual disc and physically alter it?
Michel at 10:55am 1st December 2010 I use DVDfab to rip my dvd, but for the audio part, it does not keep the dts, it is alwasy in prologic
Bill at 8:36am 24th October 2010 Hi I found your tutorial really helpful. and I have been using DVD43 and Handbrake to rip my DVD's. it has been successful for quite a number of DVDs but recently I have started to get a problem. basically, on completion of the ripping and on playback I found that the chapters of the movie have been shuffled so that after the first 5 minutes, it straight away jumps to near the end of the movie, after which it will jump to some other part of the movie, so on and so forth! Is there some problem in Handbrake? What am i doing wrong? it will be great if you could help me out!
Adel at 2:32pm 14th October 2010 I'm not sure why after I installed every thing , and when I try to rep the Anydvd gives me an error "Drive F: is not ready" where F is my blu-ray burner witch I can watch the movie from it directly, so the driver is working fine Also after all I wish to know how to use the ripped file to burn dvd or even blu-ray rwiteable better
Philcat at 2:21pm 11th August 2010 I've been using only HandBrake on the MacPro & it works in just one step. There are a few cases where the files won't read to be ripped. I think when I upgraded the ware, is when it became a problem. Glad I found you guys on YouTube to help out in this process. Thanks'
1. Philcat at 8:39pm 11th August 2010 I didn't see a link here for DVD43, but did search avs and the reviews weren't that good, for a MacPro anyway. Quote from there for alternative: with mac the ripper then I make a queue in hand brake to compress them overnight. I think this might help with those stubborn movies.
hanse132 at 8:24pm 19th May 2010 oh, cool staff. Thanks for sharing.with your guide ,rip blu ray become a simple thing

share you a cool blu-ray to iphone converter
http://www.rip-blu-ray.biz
BluRipper at 11:43pm 10th May 2010 nice for sharing ,so kind of you
BluRipper at 11:39pm 10th May 2010 oh, cool staff. Thanks for sharing.
me at 7:11am 6th May 2010 Yes you can!

http://apcmag.com/how_to_play_ripped_dvds_on_vi...
Neo at 9:31pm 19th January 2010 I use Pavtube Blu-ray Ripper do this, just one tool!
Neo at 6:17pm 18th January 2010 As far as I know, some people use AnyDVD to remove protections of their Blu-ray discs firstly, and then use an MTS/M2TS Converter to convert the .m2ts BD files into their wanted media formats. This is a definitely complicated matter, and why don’t they choose a one-stop Blu-ray ripper to do it once and for all? I guess that they may have not found a proper application to do this at all. Well, to assist you guys to simplify the conversion procedures, it’s my pleasure here to share a pretty good Blu-ray ripper to you all, hope it will be of great help for you who are searching for this solution just right.
I use this one, you can check it out,
http://bit.ly/1i0Wop
Scott at 4:35pm 14th January 2010 Here now, appreciate your patience!
Ian Bell at 8:15pm 12th January 2010 Working on it. We had to re-write it, should be back any day.
Josh at 6:56pm 12th January 2010 so how bout getting that content added back?
Ian Bell at 10:56am 5th January 2010 Sorry about that. Looks like part of the article got cut off when we moved to the new site. I will have the editorial team add it back ASAP.
disappointed at 10:41am 5th January 2010 The title of the article says "How to Rip a DVD or Blu-ray Movie". So where is the "Blu-ray" part of it? I'm asking because my understanding is that it is more complicated than a DVD. Maybe you should remove the "blu-ray" reference so that people like myself don't come here for nothing.
Neo at 7:39pm 27th November 2009 Hi,guys, my pleasure to give you my suggestions. I use Pavtube Blu-ray Ripper rip my Blu-ray discs, no other software, and only 49 dollars;
You can find this Blu-ray Ripper here: http://www.pavtube.com/blu-ray-ripper
AnyDVD HD is good at removing all sorts of BD protections, but when it comes to file size compression, it can not do anything about it. What a pity!
Neo at 7:39pm 27th November 2009 Hi,guys, my pleasure to give you my suggestions. I use Pavtube Blu-ray Ripper rip my Blu-ray discs, no other software, and only 49 dollars;
You can find this Blu-ray Ripper here: http://www.pavtube.com/blu-ray-ripper
AnyDVD HD is good at removing all sorts of BD protections, but when it comes to file size compression, it can not do anything about it. What a pity
1. Bobtang at 11:43pm 17th May 2011 I have used it a couple of times to convert a Blu-ray to a format that will play on my iPad. It works great and I am very happy. I did use the trial program first to check which works great too. I will mainly use the program to put movies on my iPad through itunes. The user interface is east to understand and I have tried one other program but didn't like it as much as this one.Moreover,I really appreciate the use of CUDA in your products.
andrew at 11:37pm 18th September 2009 I've been working on backing up my collection recently, and I found this guide to be a huge help. However, I'm running Vista 64 bit, and ran into some problems with the audio/video quality. After trying out the different programs here, and talking to a couple of friends, I've gone to using DVD shrink to rip my DVDs and simply playing the Video_TS.VOP file through media player. The only problem is that the .VOB won't play through Media Center. Does anyone have a better way of keeping a DVD at it's native resolution, with all of the menus, and still be able to easily access it through media center?
1. Xemacs at 3:24pm 30th September 2010 This was easy. Media Centre can play DVD directory you copied out. But you need install a MPEG decoder for that.
2. yao847zi at 11:47pm 22nd December 2010 Well, I always use this Blu-ray Ripper( http://wannasoft.com/Pavtube-Blu-Ray-Ripper/ ) to help me rip Blu-ray and DVDs. It can copy/back up Blu-ray DVD or convert to other video formats. And with it, i havent run into problems with the audio/video quality till now.
3. Tom Murgitroyde V at 4:22pm 18th March 2011 XBMC. The best free player available. It doesn't require you to add extenders like Media Center.