My darling wife wants to watch movies on her Ipod. I need to acquire some DVD ripper software to convert DVDs into MP4s that I can import into Itunes on her laptop.
I’ve wasted countless hours on freeware, shareware, and store-bought crapware over the years. I tried one free trial version of shareware this evening, only to have it stack-dump when I tried to use it.
So, what have you tried that works the first time and every time? It would be nice to find one piece of software to support all output formats, but I would be happy with just MP4. It would also be nice to find something that works on MS Vista without downloading a bunch of patches.
Have you tried Nero 8? It does work with Vista, it does make MP4 videos (see Recode Video to iPod), and there is a 15 day free trial so you can at least see if it does what you want before you buy it.
I don’t buy much software, but Nero 8 is one thing I have bought a license for and use for many different things. It’s worth the money because you will use it for much more than just the iPod videos, and you get free updates forever and tech support.
Check out Videora iPod Converter? It works great and I have used it. I use DVD Decrypter to get them to my HDD. Your DVD player decrypts them in order to play them so you are not doing anything your DVD player doesnt already do
The difference is that a commercial DVD player is licensed to decypt them, whereas DVD Decrypter is not, and the commercial player does not place the complete file structure of the DVD permanently on your hard drive.
It is my understanding that, in the US, DVD Decrypter falls afoul of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act’s prohibition on breaking or circumventing encryption. That’s why the US version of the DVD Decrypter website is gone, and you can now only download the program through the .uk site, and through other third-party sites.
Personally, i think that the DMCA’s provisions suck ass, and are a brilliant way for the movie and recording industry to circumvent longstanding fair use guidelines. But people should also beware that using software like DVD Decrypter in the US could land you in trouble, in the unlikely event that someone takes an interest.
I use the PQ DVD-to-iPod Video Suite. Dunno if it goes against the DMCA or not, but for $40, it works pretty danged well for me, taking videos straight from my DVDs to a format I can put on my video iPod.