How To Rip Video Clips From DVD Into Your Portable Video Device

To rip music vidoes or any video clips from your favorite DVD collection into your iPod or MP3 player or wireless phone can be time consuming, but certainly achievable.  The reward is that you can have your favorite clips in constantly high quality without relying on illegal download sites or going through the hassle of recording directly from YouTube. These clips are ready to be transferred into your portable video device.  Besides, why take the risk when you rightfully own the videos?

There are challenges to rip video clips from your DVD. I guess there may be some software applications out there that do the job with a click of a button. My only reservation is that most of these applications are not free-of-charge. When installing and uninstalling the trial versions, I have had bad experiences of system corruption that left me more problems to solve than solving the problem for me. Also, another benefit of this approach is you have the total flexibility to extract any part of the video clip out from your DVD – not be restricted to the whole chapter itself.

The prerequisite for carrying out the task is as follows.  I am sure you can easily satisfy the list.

• DVD Decrypter – Decrypting a DVD is illegal, sad to say. I personally disagree with this on the ground that if ripping my CD is legal, why would ripping the DVD that I own illegal? If you wish to stick by the law, you may wish to only rip the videos from the DVDs that have no copyright protection, which is rare.
• Video Format Converter – There is an excellent free-of-charge software application that I will recommend in later section.
• Video Editor –  You will need to perform two basic video editing functions – merge clips and split clips. At minimum, you may use the free-of-charge Windows Movie Maker. If you have other mainstream applications, use that.
• Time – It is a time consuming process, although most of the time you will be doing something else rather than siting in front of the computer and wait. I have just cut 6 music videos from a DVD that I own and it took me about 1.5 hours.  The actual edit took me probably less than 5 minutes. Don’t take this as a benchmark as each computer has a different processing speed.

The above diagram depicts what you may need to do in order to extract the video clips from the raw DVD format into individual files (e.g. mp4) that you can transfer into your iPod or MP3 Player or wireless phone for your viewing enjoyment. In the next few pages, I am going to go through how it can be done in details. Trust me, it is really straightforward. 

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