Simple ways to rip your favorite DVD on to a CD

We all love to watch DVD quality movies, but if you are sick of renting a DVD every time you want to watch it and is looking for a way to have your own copy of the movie, well a possible solution could be to RIP the DVD to your hard disk or to a CD.

Technically it is possible to squeeze your DVD contents to a CD or to your hard disk in various audio/video formats. The process involves two steps i.)Decoding the data files on the DVD and storing it on your hard disk, to do this you require a DVD decrypter. Free DVD decrypters are easily available on the internet, we recommend this one (can be downloaded for free) ii.)Encoding or copying the data back to a CD by compressing it using codecs like MPEG or DivX. Our recommendation is auto gordian knot also known as AutoGK (can be downloaded for free).

Ripping a DVD to xvid or divx avi is really quite easy, if you have the right tools, Please check out the 3 step procedure shared by Elliott Back here.

Few More Utilities:

Easy VCD: is a free utility that can rip a dvd movie and output it to a CD or as a MPEG files on your hard disk. Support both VCD (MPEG-1) and SVCD (MPEG-2) formats.

Smartripper: is another free software to create a copy of a DVD on a hard drive. The program supports three copy modes: Movie (copy the movie only), Files (copy selected files only) and Backup (copy whole disk).

DVD Ripper Platinum: which makes it easy to rip DVDs to popular video formats such as AVI, MPEG, DivX, Xvid, WMV, VOB, MOV, RM, 3GP, iPod, PSP, MP4, 3G2, etc., and extract audio files from any DVD and save as MP3, WAV, WMA, AAC, M4A, MP2, etc...

Other references on this topic:
Detailed Guide on DVD Shrink
One click guide