Best DVD Ripper

[cougfan]

I bought a PS3 to use as a Blu-Ray player, and I now realize what a simple and easy media center this will be. So I hard wired a CAT 5e line from my upstairs office down to the family room (hidden in-wall the and terminated to cover plates the right way) and I am ready to fill my new 1 TB drive media drive with movies. The question is this: What is the best DVD drive to rip movies with? Would like the fastest one for this application. I still have my Asus 18x burner and a Pioneer 212, but I would be willing to get a DVD-ROM if needed. Also, something that would access a CD as fast as my old CD-Rom drives would be nice. I suspect the diff between what I already have and what would be 'fastest' isn't very much. Anyway, just curious what people have discovered as a good ripper and any advise on file format etc. Also, since I have a gigabit MB lan, gigabit router and the PS3 has a gigabit lan port, I would think I could send HD content over the network as well?

Thanks!

[Ian]

There are a few drives out there that will rip single layer DVD movies at 16x and dual layer movies at 12x. I believe this includes the latest Lite-On and Samsung drives.

I'm not sure what the best file format would be. From personal experience, I've come across a few Xvids that were out of sync or wouldn't play at all on my PS3. I never could figure out why.

As far as HD content goes, you should be able to play it over the nextwork. Just don't do it over wireless. It can barely handle standard def movies with high bit rates.

[cougfan]

I think I am going to try DivX to begin with. The entire reason that I hard-wired a network connection was that the wireless in the PS3 just didn't cut-it for me either...

I am surprised that with all of the HTPC's out there, there just aren't very many reviews (or I just haven't found them) comparing DVD ripping speed specifically. I guess there just isn't a flat out winner. I sorta miss the heyday of optical drive discussions back in 2003 or so when the CD burners slid below $100. Just not as much interest now it seems, but I do appreciate this site still Ian!!! Too bad there isn't a big enough market for someone to create the ultimate HTPC DVD ripper designed solely for pressed DVD's. Heck, maybe resurrect what worked with the old Kenwood True 52x/72x series. I owned one of those and (when it worked) nothing was better for installing of pressed CD's. I think they were slow at DAE though... You would think that a decade later we would have the know-how to rip single-layer and double-layer DVD-Videos at 20x now, but I guess Blu-Ray is the current flavor... Besides, I guess there would be a bit of backlash from those crazy people who sell DVD's who for some reason are against my *cough* backing-up my DVD's.

[Dartman]

The newest Samsung burners can rip dvd's at like 18x speed if you get the speed patched FW for them, and I think they're pretty good quality readers anyways. Poke around CD freaks and you'll find it if you decide to try one of them. I have the 203b and my friend has the 223 and it seems to works just as well for ripping.

[Ian]

The bottleneck really isn't the ripping speed. It's the amount of time it takes to encode the movies. Then again, with quad core CPU's, this is becoming less of an issue as well.

[Dartman]

Yup, I just upgraded to a Phenom black edition 9600 quad core and it halves or better the time it took to do the same job with my 939 4600 dual core I just retired. Of course the memory is faster as well now and I also am test driving win 7 but it a fairly decent increase in speed.
It used to take me about 45 minutes to convert a 1080i capture to hd-dvd on dvd and now it takes about 14 minutes including burning. Doing the same thing to blu takes about 4 or 5 hours and also takes up more disk space, but it used to take about 8 hours to do one of them.
A Intel chip would probably be even faster still but I got a great deal on this setup