RL: Legal? Maybe
I was reading some info about getting video from a DVD onto a Sony PSP the other day. They were talking about converting a file, you’ve already ripped from your DVD, to a PSP format. For some reason, I’d never even considered ripping DVDs and I decided to give it a try.
I went to the web and quickly found a demo DVD ripping app. The demo version only did the first half of the movie, but that was fine. I was only interested in seeing the results. Apparently, I didn’t have a Divx codex installed so my options were to use mpeg1 or 2. Size is another consideration so I went with mpeg1. I started it and went out to dinner.
After dinner, when I clicked on the file, Windows Media Player opened and there it was. The quality was in the poor VHS range. As I had simply picked the first ripper program I’d found, I went looking again and found another, “Magic DVD Ripper” and downloaded that. It’s demo worked a little different in that you can rip 5 movies complete. It’s output file looked a little better to me, so if I continue with this I’ll probably spring for the $35.
There are free rippers out there but some may have trojans or whatever and I don’t want to get involved with that.
I ripped “Kill Bill 1” last night with my newly installed Divx codex. It’s size was a little under 800meg for a 1 hour 50 minute movie. I’ve not decided if this is something I want to do. I’ve only got 50gig left on my hard drive so I’d probably go with a big secondary drive. The thing is, I don’t own that many movies. I almost never watch them anyway. Why would I want them on my computer? Ahh, it was a fun experiment.