Ripit: The New Age DVD Ripping Application for the Mac
With the introduction of Core Animation in Leopard, Mac applications have taken a leap to the next level of eye candy effects. The latest to follow this trend is Ripit, a DVD ripper that brings simplicity and a cool UI to the boring process of ripping a DVD.
The Interview
A small group of like minded individuals found each other by the magic of the Internet and have begun working on some amazing projects at Indy Hall Labs. Sounds very much like how the Smoking Apples team got together, doesn’t it? The goal of the team (theirs, not ours) is to bring some fun new applications that are not only good to look at but provide improved usability by means of innovative user interfaces and capable engines that drive them from the inside.
However, ‘the Labs’ is not your average company. “The idea is that small apps should be built kinda like the way movies are built: Someone with an idea assembles financing from the community, secures talent by paying outright or with equity, the team builds the product and then releases it. After that, the team breaks up and the participants are free to reassemble themselves to build something different. The ‘labs is the facilitator that greases the wheels of this process, and handles all of the boring payment-processing/accounting/stuff and cuts checks to the participants/investors when profits roll in. We’re working out the details as we go”, explains Jason Allum, lead developer of Ripit.
Ripit is the first project out the door for this incredibly talented group. “It was a ton of fun to build”, says Jason. “With RipIt, we decided to take a new approach to both the UI design (keeping things simple) as well as the design of the actual Rip engine.”
Jason then explains the core functionality inside Ripit. “RipIt works by emulating a DVD player, down to the instructions and registers. It follows the program of the disc, copying all of the nooks and crannies that are accessible to a player, and deftly skipping around the bits that are placed there precisely to confuse other, lesser rippers. We’ve integrated failure feedback mechanisms into RipIt, so that in the rare event that something does go wrong, you can report all of the information that our engineers will need to fix the problem – this usually takes less than a week. We’ve also integrated DiscIdent, a new service that uses “fingerprinting” techniques to provide metadata (in this case, disc titles) for the discs you insert.”
Wowed by all of this, I asked what the possibilities of doing all this in a Windows environment would be. “It’s not so much a matter of whether these things could be built on Windows, but whether anyone here wants to do it!” With that, I knew Ripit was in good hands. Jason mentioned some great new projects that they have in the works and I can’t wait to review every single one of them! That said, let’s go back to what we came here to do…
Ripit, the review
I slipped in a DVD of The Lord of the Rings and launched the application. Ripit immediately recognised the disc and labelled it appropriately. The beauty of the interface is that it has just two buttons—Rip and Eject. I guess they really meant it when they said they would have a simple UI!
Clicking the Rip button starts the ripping process, which shows the percentage completed, time remaining, and the disc starts to spin! A single Stop button then adorns the little window.
“The Ripit engine has been tested with over 11,000 discs (at the time I write this) with only 10 discs that are known to fail”, says Jason. Wait a minute—what! As Jason explained earlier, Ripit anonymously reports back any successful or failed disc back to the developers. Of course, you can turn this off in the preferences if you so choose.
Performance
With the small footprint that this app takes up, the performance is nothing short of stunning. Ripit takes up just 21MB of RAM and uses up a maximum of 18% CPU on my Core Duo 2.0GHz iMac. A 6.7GB DVD took 25 minutes to complete.
Once the rip is complete, you can either eject the disc or show the movie saved on your hard drive. The file is saved as a .dvdmedia file in your movies folder. This file opens up in DVD Player complete with all the menus and other DVD features.
The missing bits
Ripit cannot rip into ‘MP4’ video that is suitable for iTunes and a lot of other portable devices, including the iPods and iPhone. ”We believe that with disk space becoming cheaper by the day, there is significant value in keeping the original movie with all of its subtitles, menus, alternate angles, and audio intact.”
However, after having gone through the unique feedback page (and getting further confirmation from Jason), it appears that they are already working on an H.264 ripper that will export directly to iTunes. I eagerly await this feature.
Conclusion
If DVD ripping means anything to you, I highly recommend giving Ripit a serious look. The smooth interface, the responsive attitude of the developers, and the features planned for the future may just make this little app the ultimate ripper for the Mac. Ripit costs $18.99 for a single user license, and you can take it for a spin for seven days for free before you’re expected to spend the dough.
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Nice interview! It’s great to know what the developers themselves are thinking. It gives you a sense of what each button means, and the reason why they put it there (Something that we don’t usually get from our big fruit company) Thank you for the interview smoking apples, and hope to see more of these.
Ripit looks like a great app with a fantastic UI, but without any encoding, I don’t see myself wanting to store 7GB movie files on my 80GB hard drive, not be able to play them on my iPhone, and basically store MPEG2 video when I could have the same quality at less than 1/4th the cost in terms of space. Will wait till we see that h264 encoder to make my decision.
Jonathan October 20th, 2008 at 8:31 pm
Awesome! An interesting post with review + interview. The UI and the DVD spinning animation looks a lot like Disco.
We should choose what all items to rip from the original DVD. I might not want to keep Arabic, Hebrew and Spanish languages plus some stupid game (exclusive DVD feature :P) in my HDD.
Ashwin October 20th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
Looks nice this app. I really like how the interface of mac applications look different, yet they work so welll together. I mean, in windows they always have that boring toolbar, with the same stupid floppy disc icon for the save. Ripit looks nice. Will check out the demo and see. Can it rip from CSS copy protected DVDs?
Vids October 20th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
Why get this when mac the ripper is free?
tbw October 21st, 2008 at 12:16 am
I’ve been using Ripit trial for the last three days and I love it! The interface is too good and I like the way it automatically labels your discs. If they just get the mp4 encoding built in I will be happy to pay the $20.
Nordic October 21st, 2008 at 12:23 am
I was a Mac the Ripper user until Handbrake came along. Handbrake just does so much for free that it’s hard to spend $20 on this. I wish Apple would just buy Handbrake and add it to iTunes.
Lantz October 21st, 2008 at 1:21 am
The only thing holding back Ripit is its lack of Mp4 encoder. But I’ve been told that this is coming soon, and a very good one at that.
MacTheRipper is a poorly supported application and has produced a lot of failed rips in my experience (and many others).
Milind Alvares October 21st, 2008 at 2:30 am
I second the recommendation of Handbrake. I’ve never had a problem with it. I usually rip all my new DVD’s to iPhone format and watch at least part of them on my iPhone, depending on where I am when I want to continue watching.
Norm October 21st, 2008 at 2:50 am
Has no one ever heard of DVD Shrink (and AnyDVD) on the Windows side of the fence? So far the Mac has absolutley nothing to compare to it. Mac has great video editing tools and Handbrake it the best for converting DVD files to avi or mp4 but why hasn’t anyone given the masses functionality allowing users to compress a DVD9 into a DVD5? Sure Popcron is out there but with it creating strange copies that don’t play on all machines DVD Shrink just works and when coupled with AnyDVD will rip absolutely anything (for free!!) and the Mac arena has nothing to compare to it? Rip It reminds me of a funkier paid version of Mac The Ripper…
scrammer October 21st, 2008 at 7:40 pm
Sounds like a nice utility. But is it respecting the DRM components of the DVD? Is it legal to rip a commercial DVD that has DRM encoded?
Mike
Mike October 21st, 2008 at 9:19 pm
@Scrammer: DVD-Shrink produces some horrible results. The artifacts and the pixelation is simply, well, I wouldn’t use it. It would be much better to reencode the stuff to H264 @ 2GB than make an MPEG2 DVD5.
@Mike: Ripit can go through almost all the DVDs out there, copyrighted ones included. It reports back unsuccessful rips, which the team then personally buys, breaks the protection and releases it into the next update.
Milind Alvares October 21st, 2008 at 9:29 pm
When it rips, what does it save the movie as? Can you burn the file in iDVD? Will you be coming out with a version that just rips the movie without the extras? How about a version that saves it as an avi file?
Steven Trudell October 23rd, 2008 at 11:14 pm
It saves the movie as a DVD media file. This is basically a folder which the video_ts and audio_ts folders encapsulated in a single file. Very much like how the iPhoto library behaves. If you double click it, it will launch in DVDplayer. You can also burn the file using Disk Utility or something along those lines. No need for iDVD as the menus are the same as in the original DVD.
You cannot save it without the extras, although I’m told this feature, along with that of saving it as an mp4 are coming soon. Do check out the demo, which is fully functional for 7 days.
Milind Alvares October 23rd, 2008 at 11:42 pm
@Vids:
MacTheRipper hasn’t been free for a long time. It’s (3.x) donationware now and only the older 2.6.6 version is downloadable on their site. To be honest the 3.x branch seems like it’s not even worth paying for seeing as I pirated it and took it for a spin. The application closes itself as soon as it faces any serious protection (like ARccOS). Do your research before you speak bad about this app.
Adam Nilsson October 26th, 2008 at 1:49 am
@Adam: I think you want to refer to commenter ‘tbw’ instead of ‘Vids’. Thanks for making us realise that the comment author name is confusing though.
Milind Alvares October 26th, 2008 at 7:29 am
I’ve had failed DVD rips on Handbrake, though I’m only running 10.4.11/OSX, not 10.5, which is annoying that they require 10.5x for the latest from Handbrake, but then hey, its a ‘free’ app. Usually the failed DVD’s come up with a <> … maybe just coincidence, but its odd
O yeah, it “is” legal to copy and backup your own DVDs. I have a huge library (for my space) … and having them on the computer (and having that backedup) can be a huge space saver. Also getting video’s via iTunes is great, though sometimes the quality is not the best (as with their low bit rate MP4s… which is the fault of the recording industry of America … otherwise known as retarded gestapo!).
People do have rights. When you buy something, you own it, your may not have full rights (lets say to give it out to all your friends, or play said media in an establishment as an attraction)… but, you do have the right to breath and nobody can take that away from you… nor can they legally tax it.
One nice thing, since I do have the DVD media, I like HB since it saves space (and does reduce the quality a bit) - so if/when these guys get the MP4 option -that should rock!
drx1 October 27th, 2008 at 5:06 am
I agree that if there were an option to reduce the quality to save space and play vids on my iphone it would totally be worth the $18. I’ll keep an eye on this app and purchase when updated.
MacTruck October 29th, 2008 at 10:37 am
@scammer DVDShrink (freeware version) hasn’t worked on newer copy protection schemes for quite a while. AnyDVD isn’t freeware, AFAIK.
Still, if you have links disproving any of this, I’d welcome them.
Stompy November 4th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
Can you rip the TS file to a DVD in Toast 8? Or is there another application that will do that?
S. Hall January 4th, 2009 at 6:04 am