Hardware rip alternative

[jdonalds]

I'm not suggesting you all go out and spend $100 for hardware to rip your DVDs but here is an alternative I've found. Previously, thanks to all the great help on ClieSource, I was using DVDx to rip DVDs for my NX70. It was free and worked well enough for me to rip about 20 movies. However DVDx would take 4 or more hours and often the sound was out of sync.

I purchased an ADS Tech DVD Express so I could convert my family library of VHS tapes to DVD. The package contains sufficient software to rip, edit and burn. The box has RCA inputs for my VHS player but it also has S-Video and my DVD player has an S-Video out. Put the DVD in the player, hook up the S-Video cable and audio cables, set up the software to record from S-Video and to create an Mpeg1 file and it works like a champ. It records at full speed and the sound is in perfect sync. Using the supplied Ulead software I can trim off the beginning and end then run it through the Image Converter.

Just thought I'd pass this along to the community.

Maybe this was obious to some of you but I was pleased to run across this capability.

Happy ripping,
John

[anitanium]

i used smartripper to rip my dvd's
then mpegmediator to put them back together into a AVI
then virtualdub to sync the audio and video together with direct stream copy

its simple and fast
maybe 3 hours at most, depending on movie length

then again,, i DO have a pretty hefty rig that could outperform a similarly equipped pentium 4 2.6ghz, give or take 100mhz

[johnl62]

I recommend Eazy VCD. This is a quick and easy way to get VCD from DVD, and then all you have to do is convert the VCD with Image Converter.