Can anyone recommend any?

Want to rip all my dvd's so I can chuck them in a box – we use the X-Box for dvd anyway so i can chuck a spare hard drive in and just leave all the films on that.

Not specifically looking for freeware – want something good that output as AVI

Cheers

Tim

we use the X-Box for dvd anyway so i can chuck a spare hard drive in and just leave all the films on that

How does that work then? I've played avi's off a USB nubbin on the xbox but there's no evident facility to transfer onto the HDD that I could see – is there a way?

Handbrake should do what you want.

I'm also interested to know how you'd get data onto the XBOX's hard drive?

I was just gonna leave a usb hard drive plugged into it – refill it occasionally 🙂

handbrake (PC 0.9.4) only has 2 output options mp4 and mkv so not sure it does what you want (does xbox play .mp4 with no messing ?)…also (handbrake) will not decrypt commercial protected discs so you you need something to for this…look at DVDFab (free will decrypt) but they have paid options which may do what you want….other software I noticed was from Slysoft.

What about ripping it and compressing it with DVD shrink?

cheers for the info

in the meantime I had downloaded this – http://www.magicdvdripper.com/

which will go straight from commercial dvd to avi (or a load of other formats)

tried it last night and it works pretty well, quality is good enough and its easy to use – i'm happy to pay to have a one click ripper as well instead of having to circumvent copy protection everytime

although if i can get Handbrake to work, i might as well use that – this is SUPPOSED to be good (strips copy protection so handbrake can just rip the dvd), but i cant get it to do anything – http://www.dvd43.com/

Oh and the 120 gb usb hard drive works fine in the xbox – although i had forgotten that it needs to be formatted fat32 (which xp/vista doesnt support very well – have to use DOS, takes forever and only does up to 32gb)

so i used this – http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm – which did it in 1.6 seconds through DOS 🙂

AnyDVD

will enable one to make a back-up onto hard drive
all the DVD menus work
all our DVDs are backed-up onto our windows home server and streamed over the network
when watching in media centre is like having the disk in the drive!

My Movies

if you have an old xbox, soft mod it and stick xbmc on it.
i rip my dvd's to my pc harddrive and then access them over the network, it works a treat. plus it does loads of handy stuff like upscaling to 720p/1080i

I use Handbrake on the Mac and its great. Just be aware that it may ask you to download additional codecs when you run it for the first time. The codecs are the little programmes that do the grunt work. This may be why some folk have suggested that it doesn't do what you want it to.

Disco_stu, when you say an old x-box, do you mean the original one? Pre-360?

I bought one when my wife was pregnant with our first born as I figured that as I would have no social life from that point on, I may as well play some games.

I used it about 10 times. It is now boxed and in the loft.

I'd heard about turning it into a media machine but never got around to doing it. Is it worth it?

http://lifehacker.com/5444274/five-best-dvd+ripping-tools

freddyg – yeah its the original xbox that i'm on about
you can set it up to access iplayer, upscale dvd's, youtube, last.fm etc

sadly it doesn't quite have the power to handle hd video ( although you can install it on windows / linux and run it on a more powerful pc )but its great as a media player connected to my lg lcd

Is the magicDVD download fully functional?

D_S. Nice one. Thanks for that – I'll add it to my list of jobs to do. Although it'll probably end up being filled with Bob the Builder and Noddy stuff.

ianpv – Member

Is the magicDVD download fully functional?

Yes…albeit for 4 films

when i say good quality – thats without anything direct to compare the same film against…but it seemed good enough. Certaionly avoided the audio/video synching problem i've had in the past from ripped films

Doing the Puffer? Do I look mad? – Member

I use Handbrake on the Mac and its great. Just be aware that it may ask you to download additional codecs when you run it for the first time. The codecs are the little programmes that do the grunt work. This may be why some folk have suggested that it doesn't do what you want

Refused to any of the films i tried it on due to copy protection (which it seems all my recent dvd's have). Bit useless in that case!

try installing dvd43 ( windows only tho i'm afraid )

Tried that last night – worked, but handbrake kept crashing