The Best Free DVD ripper software

Review of one of the best Free DVD ripper software that rips DVD to AVI,MP4, MKV or OGM. Presets for converting DVD to iTouch/ iPhone/ iPod/ PSP/ PS3/ XBOX 360 and more.

Quest for a good quality free DVD Ripper software

The search for a good quality free DVD ripper software has taken me on a long voyage. Doing a Search for the term "free dvd ripper" in Google or Yahoo etc. will land you in many directions. There are the many DVD rippers that is supposed to be free - install it and then you realize it's nothing but a "trial" version of paid software. Then there are the many free rippers that just did not work. The frustrating thing is you waste your time downloading and installing it, because only then did you know they don't work! Then there are plenty of honest DVD ripper freewares that work, but barely. Mediocre output quality, limited output formats and the list goes on. One has to be careful because some of them even have viruses/spywares that come with the installer files! It is indeed hard to find a good and usable freeware. You can imagine the irony of the situation. If you search Google for the term "free software", you will see 263 million results!! Just amazing!

Free DVD ripper software - Handbrake

Anyway, I stumble upon a french website. I think I finally found what I wanted. This free DVD ripper is ingeniously named "Handbrake". True to the name, stop I did! Let me tell you a few things I like about this free DVD ripper software.
1. Multiplatform support: This DVD ripper program is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Window(XP/2000/Vista/7). In other words, it supports all the popular operating systems we use, is capable of efficiently utilizing the computer system's resources and resulting in fast and good quality output, and best of all its a licensed free software.
2. Multi-Source: This DVD ripping program supports many source formats including real DVD image, VIDEO-TS folders(a dvd video data that is already copied to drives), .VOB files(these are the DVD video files), AVI, flv(flash video files)etc. That is, it accepts practically any multimedia video formats as source.

3. Easy output Presets /Ease of use: For the novice/beginners it can be quite a daunting task when video encoding/ processing is concerned (which in effect is the main process involved in DVD ripping). There are so many video and audio formats available today. The problem is compounded by the fact that the many different multimedia players we have viz. DVD/CD players, mobile players like iPod, iTouch, etc., have their own set of video/audio formats and settings which they can play. Therefore, knowing the format/ settings needed for a particular type of player and encoding them likewise is difficult even for the seasoned encoder/ ripper.

This is where this free DVD ripper really comes in handy. The application has a sizable Presets of output formats pre-customized for most of the popular players/gadgets we have today . With the touch of a button the ripper sets the desired output formats for DVD to iTouch/ iPhone/ iPod/ PSP/ PS3/ XBOX 360, film, animation, normal, classic and more. Using these presets you don't need to know about all the video formats for output, making life much easier.
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Handbrake - Presets Bar

4. Additional features: For the DVD ripping enthusiasts there is no dearth of additional features to manipulate the output:

File format: MP4, MKV, AVI or OGM
Video: MPEG-4, H.264, or Theora (1 or 2 passes or constant quantizer/rate encoding)
Audio: AAC, MP3, Vorbis or AC-3 pass-through (supports encoding of several audio tracks)
Chapter selection
Basic subtitle support (burned into the picture)
Integrated bitrate calculator
Picture deinterlacing, cropping and scaling
Grayscale encoding

5. End Quality of the free DVD ripper - Handbrake: The output quality of this DVD ripper is excellent. Normally in a freeware, a mere good quality would be acceptable. In the case of this ripper, I'll dare say, it beats many of the paid DVD rippers around.