What are your favorite DVD ripping tools?

[rdeffley]

Let's make a top three that are essential to you when ripping DVD's.

1) Any DVD - Hands down the BEST software for cracking copyright.

2) MKV Merge - God I love this piece of software. You can set proper aspect ratio, fix sync problems, remove unwanted subtitles, etc.. It really does do it all.

3) Handbreak - I know that a lot of people here prefer AviSynth. However, Handbreak is easy to use and produces really nice encodes.

[Kerry56]

I don't work with DVD's much these days. I've switched almost entirely to Blu-ray.

But for decryption and ripping I use AnyDVD HD most of the time and MakeMKV on occasion. For conversion or compression I use VidCoder and BD ReBuilder (or DVDRebuilder Pro for those rare times when I want to compress a DVD). ClownBD is also handy now and again.

[rdeffley]

Cool post Kerry.

For me, I unfortunately don't have a Blu-ray drive on my computer. So if I want to encode HD, I'll either get a 1080p web DL or 1080p/720p Nlu-Ray via torrent. Then I'll re-encode to 720p and a suitable size. All the DVD's that I rip are for older TV shows and movies that never got Blu-ray releases. However, there are some cases where a really nice looking SD encode, can be almost as enjoyable as HD when watched on a 1080p LED TV. I mean granted, there are details in the actor's faces that aren't quite as sharp. But still, looks pretty damn good.