At 18.99 RipIt is a little bit pricy for most users, considering that we can get HandBrake for free. RipIt allows you to convert your DVDs into digital copies that you can store on your hard drive so that you don’t have to go and grab those disks from your DVD library.
One thing that RipIt has over HandBrake is that it is geared for the typical user–someone who doesn’t have a clue what all the settings in HandBrake mean. You pop in a DVD, click the Rip button, and your DVD immediately begins to be ripped to your harddrive.
There are no system preferences which is a little bit disconcerting as it removes many of the options for more knowledgeable users, such as file size, file types, audio and video quality and all those other geeky settings.
Which leads me to a major complaint. It makes an exact duplicate of the dvd. Which is perfect for those of us wishing to create exact copies for backup purposes, but 7.8gb of space for one film on my hard drive is a bit ludacris, and I don’t mean in a witty rapper kind of way.
From what I’ve be able to figure out, it seems as if this application just copies the .vob files from the dvd and moves itto your hard drive placing them in a .dvdmedia file. This is something you can do yourself if you can get the vob files off of a DVD by dragging and dropping the vob files of a dvd to your hard drive then renaming the folder that it resides in with a .dvdmedia extension. Why would anyone pay anything to do that is beyond me. A little terminal magic and this whole process could be automated without have to pay $20.00.
The application sure is pretty though.
