Let me state right off the bat that i'm talking about ripping DVDs I've purchased for the private use of my family. Don't steal music...or movies! whew...now that that's out of the way... I have an old iMac G3 500 (CRT) that i hooked up in my daughter's bedroom. I thought it'd great for her to be able to watch her movies or listen to her music on, particularly if we have company or something. she liked it so much she stuffed some plastic potato chips down the slot-loading disc drawer and now the thing won't mount a disc. I also have a 12" power book and a spare 160GB firewire drive. i figured i'd just rip the DVDs to the HD using the PB, hook the HD up to the iMac and problem solved. I've tried a couple of programs, MactheRipper, which does a decent job but is crash prone, Handbrake, which rips to .mp4 files in real time (which is, uhmm, sllllllooooooowwwwwwwwwwww), and using the disc utility to create a new disc image. MactheRipper works best, but seems to have trouble reading the discs sometimes, plus it's pretty slow. Handbrake is just too slow, although it's a very cool program. the disc images crash my computer, or play back is flakey. anybody have any experience/success ripping DVDs?
