iSkysoft DVD Ripper: Review and License Giveaway

iSkysoft DVD Ripper is a powerful DVD ripping software for Windows that can rip DVD movies to a wide variety of video formats. iSkysoft DVD Ripper can also rip audio DVDs to different audio formats. Thanks to its different pre-configured profiles, any average PC user can easily rip a DVD movie to the hard disk with excellent quality and optimum use of disk space.

One of the best feature of iSkysoft DVD Ripper, as I mentioned, are the DVD ripping profiles. When you are unsure which video file format to choose, simply choose a profile that best fits your requirement. For example, if you wish to copy the DVD movie to your iPod touch just open the iPod menu and choose H.264 video for iPod touch or MPEG4 for iPod touch. The program will automatically chose the best settings that make the rip compatible with the device. Using profiles anybody can rip a DVD to iTunes or a DVD to WMV, MP4 etc.

Nothing is set in stone though. You are free to tweak the settings, bit rates, encoder and so on. iSkysoft DVD Ripper supports most portable players such as iPhone, iPod, Apple TV, PSP, Xbox 360, PS3, iRiver, Creative Zen, Archos, PMP, Smart Phone, Pocket PC, PDA, cell phone, MP4 Player, MP3 player, and many more. The software also supports conversion to a wide variety of video formats: WMV, AVI, MP4, MOV, MPEG, H.264/AVC, 3GP, MP3, AAC etc.

Another useful feature is the ability to edit and clip the video before ripping. Editing includes cropping the video, which enables you to remove black bars at the top and bottom of the video, adding watermark, adjusting brightness, color, contrast and applying different filters (gray, negative, old film) to the video.

Clipping allows you to cut out any section of the video by setting end and start time. This lets you trim the video and remove unwanted portions like advertisement, promotion and credits from the movie. The software can also split any video file into multiple clips, or join multiple clips into one.

iSkysoft DVD Ripper will also remove all restrictions the DVD has (CSS, Region, RCE, Sony ARccOS, PuppetLock)

Regarding quality, iSkysoft DVD Ripper does decent rips at bit rates above 1500 kbps. But high bitrates results in larger file size. If you aren’t worried about size, you should choose between 1500 kbps and 2000 kbps. On the other hand, if you are stringent on file size you can drop to 900 kbps or 768 kbps. That will drop the file size to 800 MB or 1GB, but don’t expect Axxo quality rips.

If you own an NVIDIA CUDA based video card, iSkysoft DVD Ripper can take advantage of the GPU power to speed up DVD ripping and conversion to up to 5 times, according the publisher. The software also takes full advantage of multi-core CPUs and the user has the ability to control the number of cores the software will utilize.

Things I like

• Huge support for media players and file format
• Remove region restrictions and DRM from DVD
• Ability to pause DVD ripping
• Crop and trim video
• Multi-core support

Giveaway

iSkysoft is sponsoring 5 licenses of iSkysoft DVD Ripper for this giveaway, each of which is priced at $39.95. Like always, entering the contest is easy. Just leave your name and email address in the form below and winners will be decided by a draw.

The contest ends on 28 August 2010.