How to Rip your DVD’s into iTunes on your Mac
I’m continually infuriated with the large media companies and their efforts to control my consumption. If I’ve bought a DVD, I think I should be able to watch it - on any device. I also think I should be able to put it on my computer and watch it in my living room. My thanks to the studios that get this, is truncated by my furry at the more numerous conglomerates which want me to buy multiple copies of the same thing. This effort to protect content really only hurts the honest consumer - the folks stealing content will just continue to do that. It’‘s not an ease-of-use issue (or lack thereof) that inhibits piracy.
Anyway, I think it should be easy to take your DVD’s and put them on your mac. But it seems a bit complicated and if you do some reading through a Google search on this, you can be led down a number of paths that make the process more difficult than it needs to be. Here’s how you do it:
1) Download RipIt and go ahead and pay the Little App Factory for it. You’ll never regret it. If you are pressed for cash, RipIt will run you $25. But you can get all their software as a bundle for $60, and you might be surprised at how much you use it.
2) Download VLC - an open source, cross platform, media player. You can get it here.
3) Start RipIt and put a disc in your machine. Click Rip, and save the files somewhere you’ll remember to look. Then point VLC to the files, and save them to the appropriate format (I’ve been using AppleTV2, but depending on your needs you might want something else.
I see my DVD collection going the way of my CD collection…
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