Ripit rips DVDs to your Mac

One of the more convenient aspects of an iPhone or iPod touch is the ability to buy and carry iTunes movies and TV shows wherever you go. What about all those DVD movies you’ve bought over the past 10 years? The Mac has a few utilities which can rip most DVD movies so you can store them on your Mac. It’s a slow and tedious process. Instead of carrying DVD movies with your Mac when you travel, rip the movies to your Mac with Ripit.

Ripping means copying, as in copy from the original DVD to your Mac or another DVD. Ripping carries the connotation of stealing, though it may or may not be in the case of movies.

Ripit copies your DVD movie to your Mac so you can play it on your Mac so you don’t have to carry DVD discs when you head out the door with your Mac.

It’s that simple. If your Mac runs OS X Leopard and you have a SuperDrive (or DVD player), Ripit copies your DVDs to your Mac.

Advantage

It’s battery economics and convenience. Using your Mac as a DVD player means your battery will run down faster. Hard drives use less power to play a movie than a DVD players does to play the same movie.

Mac hard drives are huge these days and dozens of DVD movies can fit on nearly any model of the new Macs. Once the movie has been copied to your Mac you can move it wherever you choose, play it when you want, even find it via Spotlight.

When you copy your Mac’s hard drive contents to your back up drive, the movies go along for the ride, safe and sound via Ripit.

Rip or Copy?

Semantics aside, there is a little difference. You can use MacTheRipper (if you can find a copy) or, Mac DVD Ripper Pro, or the venerable HandBrake.

HandBrake, for example, can take an hour to copy a DVD movie on your Mac while Ripit copies the same movie in minutes. It’s just a copy and it’s on your Mac’s hard drive, ready for playback whenever your choose.

Is It Legal?

That depends upon who you ask. If you don’t get the answer you want, seek a second opinion.

The motion picture industry won’t like it if you copy a DVD movie to your Mac. They won’t sue you or have you arrested unless you begin making copies for distribution.

Courts have ruled that copyrighted material can be copied for personal use, which is exactly what Ripit does to DVD movies. They’re copied from the DVD disc to your Mac for your personal use.

Using Ripit

Handbrake comes with a dizzying array of options to rip, uh, copy DVDs. Ripit is rather simple by comparison.

Stick a DVD movie into your Mac. Select a location for the copied DVD movie to be stored (even an external hard drive). Click to begin the copy process.

How easy is that?

Can you burn the DVDs to a blank DVD? That’s not what Ripit is about. HandBrake makes that process easier, and HandBrake seems to be able to rip DVDs that give Ripit troubles, though both are increasingly rare.

Neither utility is without quirks and problems.

If all you want is to get your DVD collection onto your Mac quickly and easily, Ripit is a good choice, though HandBrake does much more and is free (and more difficult for most Mac users).