What is the best free program to rip a DVD to mp4 files ?

[Digmen1]

I own a couple of DVD's that I would like to rip and save to my to PS.

I have done it a few years ago using DVD decrtypter or rip it for free and then converting the VOB's to avi using avi demuxe.

I would now like to convert from DVD to Mp4

I understand that there are programs that can rip and convert to mp4 in one process eg mpegstreamclip

What do most of you use today (free programs only please)

Windows programs only

[mike20021969]

Try VidCoder (which is basically a more user friendly version of HandBrake).

[Digmen1]

Thanks but I was really asking which are some of the most popular programs, it looks like Vidcoder is only just out of beta.

Surele there must be a few mature, well tested and supported programs that most of you use ?

[Steve(MS)]

A lot of video programs stay in beta all the time.

Handbrake/Vidcoder are top choices for what you want to do.

[TSJNachos]

I mostly use XMedia Recode, as it's simple straight-forward interface makes many tasks quick and easy. I'll also use XviD4PSP 5 from time to time, as I see fit, since it has more powerful post-processing features.

MediaCoder is also common I think, but I haven't found it to be too particularly reliable. There are plenty of other tools on THIS page.

Or, if you really wanted to, you could manually learn the command lines for either FFMpeg or Mencoder. However, the last suggestion certainly isn't for everyone, since command lines tend to be a pain to learn.

[Hoser Rob]

DVD Decrypter hasn't been updated since 2005. Good program (it supports separate chapters) but it won't work with many newer discs. Try DVDFab HD Decrypter instead. It's free. The encoder part (DVDFab) is trialware and it's not as good really.

I'd recommend handbrake or vidcoder too. As mentioned, it's really the same encoder with different interfaces. I think it has the best balance between power and ease of use. Given the inherent complexity of video encoding and the lack of consistent standards, that's hard to do.

Using one program to both rip and encode sounds good, but I've found that using dvdfab decrypter followed by handbrake is actually faster. Even though there's an extra step.

The thing is, optical drives are slow. They're definitely the slowest thing in your machine. I have 2 laptops with dvd drives. One is about 3 times faster than the other. Burning the same size .iso with imgburn in either takes the same amount of time.

So it's good to just use the drive for the decrypting part, since that doesn't take much cpu. Then you can do the encoding, which does use a lot of cpu, from the hard drive. It's actually faster that way and I think it saves wear and tear on the drive too.

[Digmen1]

Thanks guys
Some very useful info