How to Rip DVDs and Burn Them For Free

January 27, 2007 by Anil P.  
Filed under Tech

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Using free means ripping your dorm-mate’s DVDs personally created DVDs easily. College kids, frequent travelers, and people selling celebrity sex tapes here is how you do it. Of course you can forgo DVDs and watch free movies and TV shows online via PeekVid and TVLinks.

• First thing’s first, you have to ‘rip’ and decrypt your DVD. All DVDs are encrypted (very poorly I might add) so download DVD Decrypter. Oh yeah, then install it too.
• Get familiar with this interface, there are three parts that you need to to be aware of (Source, Destination, and DVD > Hard Drive).
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• The Source is the DVD drive your DVD is sitting in. For most people there is only one drive and it is selected by default, for geeks you may have 4 drives – but then again most geeks probably don’t need this tutorial.
• The Destination is where all of the DVD files are going to be dumped. They are big files and to make them easy to find drop them to your C drive. You can do that by clicking the little folder.
• Finally once you get all of that set, it’s time to rip baby rip! Click the little DVD > Hard Drive icon and the process begins.
• It will take about 30 minutes, go grab yourself a beer.

Now the ripping part is done. You are left with some files in your C drive named after the movie (for example, C:\Godfather).

If you have Nero, you can use that to burn these “raw” files to DVD, but Nero isn’t free although Final Burner is. Download and install it. Hang in there you are almost done

• When you run Final Burner, the start up screen will give you three options, select Burn an already authored DVD-Video (VIDEO_TS).
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• Make sure you’ve selected Burn an already authored DVD-Video (VIDEO_TS).
• Then find the files you just ripped (aka. C:\Godfather).
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• You’ll find a file named VIDEO_TS in the (for example C:\Godfather) folder.
• Click Burn.
• 30-45 minutes later you’ll have your very own DVD, exactly like the original.

Last but not least delete the movie folder so you don’t use up useless space on your hard drive

This is for Windows users only it is way easier to do this on a Mac. Click this link download the free program Handbrake.

I know this is a long post, but if you want to rip and burn DVDs the free way, here you go! Good luck and if you have any comments let us know, well…in the comments!

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