How to Rip DVDs to Your Computer (HandBrake or VLC)

How to Rip DVDs to Your Computer (HandBrake or VLC)

It may seem like we left the DVD era behind a long time ago. These days, most computers do not even come with an optical drive, and even Netflix, once a giant in DVD rentals, pivoted to streaming years ago. But DVDs have not disappeared completely. When I built my own PC last year, I still chose to include an optical disc burner. Even though CDs and DVDs are becoming rarer, they still appear from time to time—many hardware manufacturers still distribute device drivers on discs (which is all the more reason to back them up immediately), and there are also things like children's educational materials.

What is becoming rare, however, is the hardware needed to play DVDs. Hardly anyone wants to bother with a standalone DVD player at home anymore. So ripping DVDs to a computer—ideally converting them into a format like MP4—remains a skill worth keeping.

The most convenient option is probably the all-purpose media player VLC. On my Linux laptop, it is practically my one and only multimedia hero. However, VLC has been far less stable for me on Windows. Part of that may be because VLC's developers have not focused much on Windows, and part of it may simply be Windows itself. On the latest version of Windows 10, VLC kept crashing and never successfully completed the DVD ripping job for me. Still, I want to mention VLC first, if only because I personally like it.

In VLC, you can go to the Media menu and choose Convert / Save to enter the DVD conversion workflow. Select Disc and choose the appropriate disc type, and you can begin converting the DVD. But as mentioned above, VLC was not stable enough for me on Windows, though it did work under Ubuntu and openSUSE.

The Windows ecosystem is full of junk software. The ones that are only slightly less junky often charge money, and some big internet companies still have terrible habits: charging users while also stuffing their computers with intrusive software bundles. One careless click and you end up with an entire “software family pack” installed, along with endless prompts, misleading installers, and ad pop-ups. Every time I see Windows users struggling through this swamp of awful software, Windows feels less like an operating system and more like a giant dump. Those greedy internet companies are like flies and cockroaches hovering over it. By comparison, the many contributors to the open-source ecosystem on Linux seem almost saintly. Hopefully one day, open-source software will help clean up this mess—or perhaps remove the entire dump altogether.

Fortunately, the power of open source has also reached DVD conversion. Besides VLC, another highly recommended tool is HandBrake. With its help, I successfully ripped all of my DVDs. (As an aside, Bandizip is another Windows utility worth recommending; it can replace WinRAR and similar tools.)

You can download HandBrake from its official website: http://handbrake.fr. It is cross-platform and works on Mac, Windows, and Ubuntu. There is also a command-line version available. Once downloaded and installed, it can rip ordinary DVDs that do not have copy protection. But since the vast majority of DVDs are copy-protected, you will also need to install libdvdcss in order to rip all DVDs. On Windows, you can simply download the libdvdcss-2.dll file and copy it into the HandBrake installation directory (by default, C:\Program Files\HandBrake).

Using the software is very simple: insert the disc, open HandBrake, click the Open Source button in the upper-left corner, and choose the DVD disc as the source. Then select the destination path for the output. There are many detailed settings in between, but by default it will export as MP4. Click Start Encode, then go make yourself a cup of coffee, pick up a book, and let the computer do the rest.

Now a few words about macOS. Unlike Windows, macOS uses SIP (System Integrity Protection), which keeps applications relatively well-behaved and prevents the system from turning into the kind of junk-software landfill that Windows often becomes. The tradeoff, of course, is that macOS can be expensive—literally expensive. You may end up spending so much on software that it quickly exceeds the already high cost of the Mac itself.

Because of SIP, HandBrake on macOS cannot rip copy-protected DVDs—which is to say, effectively almost all DVDs. You could disable SIP, of course, but that is absolutely not something I would recommend. It should not really even be considered an option. The benefits of SIP far outweigh its limitations.

A more roundabout workaround is as follows:

Close HandBrake, then open a new Finder window. Press Cmd + Shift + G, and paste this path:

/Library/SystemMigration/History/

Inside that folder, there should be a folder named something like Migration-[random letters and numbers].

Open that folder, and you should find QuarantineRoot. Open it, and you should see your libdvdcss.2.dylib file.

Then open a second Finder window. Press Cmd + Shift + G again and paste this path:

/usr/local/lib

If you get an error saying the folder does not exist, go to /usr/local, create a new folder named lib, and open it.

Drag the libdvdcss.2.dylib file from the first Finder window into the /usr/local/lib folder. The system will ask for your administrator password. Enter it and wait for the copy to finish. After that, you should be able to rip your DVD.

Blu-ray discs require a somewhat different process, but since I do not own a Blu-ray drive or any Blu-ray discs, I have not had the chance to explore that in depth, so I will not go into it here.