Posted 11/24/08 at 12:00:00 PM by Will Smith

It’s hard to believe in the iTunes era of blink-and-you-miss-them CD rips, but in the mid-90s, ripping a CD was a time-consuming process, fraught with peril. Ripping a single disc to 128kbps MP3 could take 8 hours on a 200MHz Pentium! Fast forward a decade, with faster hardware and better software and CD ripping is so mainstream your mom does it.

Ripping DVDs and transcoding the video stored within into more efficient formats involves an order of magnitude more scary math than ripping audio CDs. A machine that will rip the latest Miley Cyrus CD in moments could take hours to extract and convert your copy of AVP to an iPod-friendly format. However, with the right software, a quad-core equipped PC, and a little know-how, you can cut your disc rip time from hours to 20 or 30 minutes. There are still plenty of tricks and traps for first-time rippers, but we’ll show you the basics, then walk you through the secrets of ripping power users everywhere.

However, the first thing you need to decide is simple: what player are you ripping your discs for? Are you ripping for a portable player, like the PSP or iPhone? Would you rather stream to device in your living room, like the Xbox 360, PS3, or Popcorn Hour? Are you simply interested in making an archival-quality DVD rips, in case you lose your collection? More likely, you’re probably looking for a combination of all three of these things. We’ll show you how to rip your DVD to a file suitable for streaming that consumes a fraction of the disk space of a DVD but maintains full video and audio quality. Then you can take that file, and convert it for whatever other devices you might have, like a PSP or an iPod. For the purposes of this story, we're going to focus on DVD rips. Getting ahold of unencrypted high-defintion video legally is still pretty tricky. We'll update with Blu-ray ripping info as ripping Blu-ray gets easier.

Hit the jump to get started.

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Posted 06/28/07 at 08:02:52 PM by Michael Brown

Forget MP3! We make bit-by-bit perfect copies of our music collection using a lossless codec

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Posted 08/06/06 at 08:07:01 AM by the Maximum PC Staff

The complete PDF archive of the April 2006 edition of Maximum PC, every article included, every page posted! Download it now!

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Posted 03/01/05 at 12:00:00 AM by The Maximum PC Staff

In the PDF archive of the March 2005 issue, you can find:

• How To: Copy Every Disc You Own!
• Digi-Cam Shoot Out!
• Case Painting: How to Paint Like a Master Modder
• Behind the Scenes Look at Product Testing
• 11 New Reviews
• Ask the Doctor
• Rig of the Month
• The Watchdog
• And a whole lot more!

Click the big giant cover image to the right to download the PDF archive today!

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Posted 01/14/05 at 03:44:37 PM by Maximum PC

Finally, a reliable, powerful, easy-to-use DVD-to-MPEG4 ripper

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