RipIt is great for moving DVD videos to your Mac (or other Apple device)

When you need to “rip” DVDs to your Mac’s hard drive, the Little App Factory’s $24.95 RipIt does it well and quickly. But it’s a no-frills app, so other software may meet your needs better. And it can’t rip Blu-ray discs.

A lot of folks (most folks?) now purchase/rent movies online. If you’re among them — or if you now buy all your films online, but have a DVD collection you’d like to digitize — RipIt gets your movies off the disc and onto your Mac, where it’s easier to find, organize and play ’em. I ripped a DVD of Saturday Night Fever in about 23 minutes.

Ripping a DVD to watch, has several advantages. If you’re watching a movie on a laptop, a “ripped” version conserves battery space over playing the DVD because extra juice is required to spin a disc. You can use Spotlight in macOS to find a movie in your collection. Movies stored in your computer can’t get lost, scratched or broken. Plus, you don’t have to carry about the DVD discs themselves with your laptop. 

RipIt, which works on any version of Mac OS X or macOS, couldn’t be easier to use. Start the app and it asks you to insert a DVD. Do so, and it quickly rips it to your hard drive, saving it in your Movies folder. 

On the downside, it doesn’t put ripped movies into iTunes. If you do a regular or “full” rip you won’t be able to play the .dvdmedia file in iTunes as some conversion is necessary. You can use the compression feature to produce a high quality video that can play in iTunes. Before ripping the disc, under the compression preferences select your desired video target such as iPod/iPhone/ AppleTV.

However, if you don’t mind that — or only plan to watch ripped movies on your Mac — RipIt is a gloriously simply app to use. Now if it could only rip Blu-ray discs ….

Apple World Today Rating (out of 5 stars): ★★★★