iMacsoft Free DVD Ripper is a totally free DVD ripping program for Windows with features usually seen only in commercial products.
I have reviewed a fair number of DVD ripping programs in the past – a majority of them happens to be paid software. When compared to freeware DVD ripping programs, the commercial programs always had an edge over the free ones. They always had a better interface, had exhaustive support for media file formats and built in profiles for different portable devices and media players. I was eager to see a free DVD ripper that was at least half as decent as the paid ones.
iMacsoft Free DVD Ripper is not half as decent – it’s a full replacement for every expensive DVD ripping program out there. The software comes with fantastic support for portable devices, user configurable video settings, a video trimming tool, and other features which we shall see shortly.
iMacsoft Free DVD Ripper can rip videos from either a physical disc, a disc image or a DVD folder on the hard drive. Just load the DVD or DVD folder into the program and it will automatically list all available titles and chapters on the disc. If the disc contains multiple angles, a feature typically found on porn DVDs, you can extract them too. No other DVD ripping program that I’ve tried till date offered this function.
The next step would be to select the output video format. These are grouped into common video, common audio, iPhone, iPad, PS2, PS3, mobile phone, Windows mobile etc. Each of these groups contain multiple different formats. Practically, all video formats are supported.
If you intend on ripping a DVD and burning it again on to a disk, you can choose to split the video file into 650 MB, 700 MB, 4.7 GB or any custom sized chunks. The video trimming tool lets you set a start and end position on the video file, and only the marked segment will be ripped. This is useful to get rid of advertisement at the beginning of the video and end credits at the end. This in turn reduces the file size of the ripped video.
You can also choose the zoom level – letterbox, pan and scan or full.
On the left, is a small preview window which is basically a video player that lets you preview the video files before ripping. Above the preview window, you will find the video settings. These can be directly clicked on and edited. You can change the video size, bit rate, aspect ration, frame rate, and quality (variable or constants bit rate).
Once you have gone through the above steps, all that remains is to click on the red button to commence ripping.
WOT – This is a spam site.
Seems like the site tried to spam/advertise their products on Macworld.com's forum. Aside from that, there is nothing malicious on the site. And the product itself is great.