When you need to back up your DVD movie or play the movie on your portable devices like your Smartphone, iPad, Phone, PSP, etc, all you need is to get a DVD Ripper. Following are the things you need to know about a DVD Ripper.

What a DVD Ripper can do for you?

A DVD ripper is usually an app that can facilitate copying the content of a DVD to a hard disk drive. It is mainly used to transfer video on DVDs to different formats so that the video can be played on various media players and mobile devices. With a nice DVD ripper, you can do the following jobs:

1. Rip DVD to all popular video and audio formats like AVI, WMV, MP4, MOV, FLV, MPG, etc.

2. Rip DVD to HD Videos including HD TS, HD AVI, HD WMV, HD MOV, HD MPG, HD MP4, etc.

3. Trim backgrounds, remove those "black bars" found around full screen films, or just crop what you don't like and save it converting.

4. Split a movie into smaller sections to fit it on your multimedia device or merge several separate video files into one.

5. Add watermark to personalize your video or adjust image brightness, contrast saturation and apply filter effects.

How to rip DVD with a DVD Ripper?

Step1. Download a good DVD ripper.

Step 2. Insert your DVD disc into computer's DVD-ROM, launch DVD Ripper.

Step 3. Import your DVD files.

Step 4. Select an output format and destination folder for saving the output files.

Step 5. Edit, combine and crop your movie. (Optional options)

Step 6. Click the "Start" button to start ripping your DVD.

What should you notice about using a DVD Ripper?

Ripping DVDs is not simple. The DVD video format is complicated. And the files required in DVD ripping are much larger, especially on dual-layer DVDs, and the conversion is a complicated process.

For some commercial DVDs, there are other considerations including the copy protection on the discs, and the legality of copying the content. So if you decide to use a DVD ripper to rip your DVD, please note that you can only rip the DVD for your own personal use. It is not legal to copy DVDs for any other purposes.

Free DVD Rippers that you can have a try

If you don't want to pay for ripping DVD after purchasing the DVD, you can opt for a free DVD ripper. Following are some good examples and you can download them from hodosoft.com.

1. Handbreak. This open source DVD ripper works on Windows, MacOS X, and Linux. It can help you convert a DVD into formats that can be played on your Mac, PC, iPod, PSP, Apple TV, Television, iPhone, or mobile phone.

2. WinX DVD Ripper. A free Windows DVD ripper that can help you backup DVD to hard drive for better protection, and rip DVD to MP4, WMV, AVI, FLV, MOV, MPEG, H.264 so that you can play it on iPhone, iPod, Apple TV, Android phone, PSP, etc.

3. MacTheRipper. This free DVD ripper works under Mac OS X. It enables you to rip both homemade and protected DVDs by removing the DVD copy protections, such as CSS encryption, RCE region protections, ARccOS copy protection, etc on Mac machine.