Easily Turn Your PC into a DVD Ripping MachineCommercial DVD

Commercial DVDs are far too expensive to let scratches turn yourvideo into a glorified coaster, but most people still don't back uptheir DVD collection. Once upon a time, the four to eight gigabytefootprint of a DVD on your hard drive was prohibitively large. Butsince the price of a gigabyte has plummeted, ripping your entire DVDcollection to your computer is not just possible, it's prudent—and it'seasy. Let's take a look at the best ways to back up and play any DVDrip on your home computer, along with how to burn a DVD rip back to a playable DVD. What You'll NeedAll you need is a PC with a DVD drive and a hard drive with some extraspace. If you're working on a computer with limited space, that doesn'trule you out. You can find huge internal hard drives for cheap (like this 500GB drive for $99), and installing that hard drive is a breeze.

Youonly need a DVD drive capable of burning DVDs if you want to burn yourbackups back to a disc you can play in a DVD player. DVD burners are crazy cheap at under $30, and they install just as easily as hard drives.
I'm focusing on Windows solutions for this article. That doesn'tmean there aren't methods available for other operating systems—it justmeans that the scope of this feature is limited to Windows users.
Set Up Painless DVD Ripping to Your Hard DriveThere are several methods for ripping your DVDs on your Windows computer, but lets run down a couple of the best below.

Rip DVDs in One-Click with DVD Rip and DVD Shrink

Our first and favorite option for ripping DVDs to your hard drive is DVD Rip,a free, open source application built in the Lifehacker workshopdesigned to make backing up DVDs to your hard drive as simple aspossible. DVD Rip works in conjunction with another tool called DVD Shrink,a freeware application that rips and compresses the DVD image. DVDShrink does all the heavy lifting—DVD Rip just makes it super-simple touse.

Pros:DVD Shrink compresses your rips so they take about half the space onyour hard drive, so despite the fact that storage is cheap, you canstill get more bang from your buck. Also, using DVD Rip in conjunctionwith DVD Shrink is designed to be simple enough that anyone in yourfamily could use it. DVD Rip is also designed to work well with DVD Play, another helper app (mentioned below), for playing back your DVDs.
Cons: If you want your backups to be exact copiesof your DVDs, the shrinking aspect of DVD Shrink probably isn't foryou. It saves space, but it skimps on some video fidelity to do it. Thespace versus quality trade-off is one I'm comfortable making with mostDVDs, but you may want to try it out yourself to be sure. However, asmany commenters have mentioned below, DVD Shrink is capable of rippingDVDs at full quality if you don't want to save on space.
NOTE: DVD Shrink can break the copy protection on most DVDs without issue, but if you're having a problem, try running previously mentioned DVD43, which promises to remove copy protection from virtually any DVD, before you start DVD Shrink.
DVDFab HD Decrypter

Like DVD Shrink, DVDFab HD Decrypter breaks copy protection and rips the DVD contents to your hard drive. Unlike DVD Shrink, DVDFab does notcompress the rip, so it's going to be the same quality as the original.DVDFab is actually a shareware app, but the trial version does full DVDrips and will even rip only the main movie.
Pros: DVDFab has a great reputation for cutting through copy protection, and it results in full quality rips.
Cons: Full quality rips mean lots of hard drivespace per movie—around 8GB. If that's not a problem, more power to thefull rip. If it is, DVD Shrink (with or without DVD Rip) will half thatto about 4 or 5GB and might be more your taste. You might also considerripping just the main movie with DVDFab if you don't want or need theextra features to save space.
Play Back Your Rips

Nowthat you've set up your computer to inhale any and every DVD you throwits way, you want to play these ripped DVDs. You could go one stepfurther and encode them to popular compressed formats like DivX, butthe rips you've already set up have their own charm for a couple ofreasons.
First, ripping DVDs to the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders (thedefault output for these methods) means you retain the entire DVDstructure, so watching the rip works just like if you were watching theDVD, complete with menus and special features. Second, these folderscan easily be burned back to DVDs so that—in the event that one of yourphysical discs is damaged—you can just burn the backup and never miss abeat. Here are a few methods and apps you can use to play back theseDVDs on your computer and burn new DVDs from the rips.
Play Back Ripped DVDs with DVD Play and VLCSimilar to DVD Rip, DVD Playis a helper application that works in conjunction with the popular opensource media player, VLC, to help you navigate and play back yourripped DVDs. To get a look at how DVD Play works in action, check outthe video below.

Inthis video DVD Play is playing back a DVD ripped using DVD Rip and DVDShrink. All you have to do is point DVD Play at the folder where you'reripping all of your DVDs, and it provides a nice interface for browsingand playing back those ripped DVDs.
Play Back Ripped DVDs in Windows Media CenterIf you're a Windows Media Center user, you can play back these rippedDVDs from directly within Media Center. In pre-Vista versions of MediaCenter, you can just add your rips folder to your My Videos library andthey'll automatically show up as playable. The DVD library feature isturned off by default in Vista's Media Center, but all it takes is one small tweak to enable it.

Burn Your Backups to a New DVD with ImgBurn

Finally,if your physical disc gets damaged, you can always burn a new DVD fromyour backup (again, with DVD menus and all the extra features). Thistime, we're using a freeware application called ImgBurn.To burn one of your backups to a new DVD, just fire up ImgBurn andenter Build mode by selecting Mode -> Build from the ImgBurn menu.Now just click browse folder icon beneath the source dropdown and pointImgBurn to the folder of the ripped DVD you want to burn.
After you've selected the folder, insert a blank DVD and then clickon ImgBurn's Calculate button to determine if your DVD has enough spaceto burn the backup. If you want to back up DVDs you ripped using DVDFab(all 8GBs), you'll need a dual-layer DVD burner capable of burning to8GB dual-layer DVDs. If you've just got a regular old DVD burner thatcan only burn to 4GB single-layer discs (which I suspect is most ofus), the DVD Shrink method above is your best choice.

Now,assuming you've got a DVD big enough to handle your DVD rip, just clickthe Build button (pictured) and let 'er burn. Note: If your Buildbutton does not look like the button pictured, you need to switch toDevice Output mode by clicking the small button to the left of theBuild button to switch to Device Output mode—otherwise ImgBurn willwant to create an ISO file on your hard drive rather than burn the disc.