Five Best DVD-Ripping Tools [Hive Five]

Five Best DVD-Ripping Tools [Hive Five]: "

You pay good money for your DVDs, but they're hardly the only format you need these days. These five ripping tools ensure you can back them up, keep them on your media server, and load them on your favorite portable player.

Photo by jonasj.

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite DVD-ripping tool. We tallied up the votes, and now we're back to highlight the five most popular tools used by Lifehacker readers to rip, backup, and encode their DVD collections.

DVD Shrink (Windows, Free)

DVD Shrink is a free and capable ripping tool that excels at, as the name would imply, shrinking DVDs. DVDs come in two common formats: DVD-5 (4.7GB) and DVD-9 (8.5GB); the Reauthor mode in DVD Shrink helps you to ditch disc extras and strip most larger DVDs down to fit into a standard (and less expensive) DVD-5 disc. DVD Shrink does a good job handling many protection schemes, but hasn't been updated to remove some of the newest schemes.

DVD Fab (Windows, $50)

DVD Fab is a commercial DVD ripper that supports the removal of all current DVD copy protections. In addition to being current on protection schemes, it boasts a large array of options for stripping and repacking your DVDs once the copy protection is removed. You can rip the entire disc, rip only the main movie, or split it into pieces—among other options. Like DVD Shrink, DVD Fab also supports compressing DVD-9 discs to fit on DVD-5 discs.

Handbrake (Windows/Mac/Linux, Free)

Handbrake is a DVD-ripping tool with a strong emphasis on not just ripping media but recoding it for playback on computers, portable devices, and other non-disc based systems. Handbrake can help you convert DVDs and other MPEG-based video into MP4 and MKV files. You can tweak settings like video frame rate and audio codec playback to your heart's content with Handbrake, and even batch encode all your media at one time to make filling up your iPod or other device relatively painless. The one major shortcoming of Handbrake is that it doesn't have any copy protection removal tools built in, which means you may occasionally need to use a 3rd-party stripping tool to prepare your DVD for conversion.

AnyDVD (Windows, $60 per year)

AnyDVD is another commercial entry in this week's Hive Five. It's not cheap, with a one year license running $60—although the multi-year discounts quickly stack up—but it can boast that it stays on top of current protection and encryption schemes to make sure you're never locked out of your own discs. In addition to stripping protections from the disc, it also has the ability to control DVD playback speed so that DVDs played on media center computers will play slower and quieter, and it allows you to remove things like forced subtitles, warning screens, and disc material you don't want.

DVD Decrypter (Windows, Free)

Although DVD Decrypter hasn't been updated since 2005, it still works on a significant number of DVDs and has a strong following resulting from both its original user base and new users who find it cuts through the copy protection on their current DVDs protected with CSS, Macrovision content protection, region codes, and other hindrances.

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Now that you've had a chance to look over the five most popular DVD-ripping tools as nominated by Lifehacker readers, it's time to cast your vote for the tool you like best:

Which DVD-Ripping Tool Is Best?(trends)

Have a favorite that wasn't featured or a tip for ripping DVDs? Let's hear about it in the comments. If you have an idea for a future Hive Five send us an email at tips @ lifehacker.com with 'Hive Five' in the subject line.

Amazing sci-fi short film done for $300

Amazing sci-fi short film done for $300: "

This special F/X-laden five-minute robot invasion flick is about giant robots 'coming to destroy my small city. I think maybe it's an attempt to make the city look bigger and more important... :-),' says the director, Fede Alvarez. About the production, Fede says:

It took US$300 to shoot the live action, and then maybe a year to complete the 90 vfx shots (during very interrupted periods...) I used Premiere, After, Photoshop, 3dMax, Boujou, Glu3d, and FumeFx. The modeling, mapping and rigging of the Robots, fighters and planes was made by Mauro Rondan.

[via Kent Barnes' Twitter feed]

The Deadliest place on Earth

The Deadliest place on Earth: "

“It’s 50oC and has a humidity of 100%, less than a hundred people have been inside and it’s so deadly that even with respirators and suits of ice you can only survive for 20 minutes before your body starts to fail. It’s the nearest thing to visiting another planet – it’s going deep inside our own.

For ‘How Earth made us’ I have been lucky enough to film everywhere from tiny Pacific islands to the centre of the Sahara desert, yet nowhere could prepare me for filming in The Giant Crystal Cave – Cueva de los Cristales of Mexico.”

Read the full story at The Iron Ammonite

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Tetra the micromouse needs no cheese, completes maze in under five seconds (video)

Tetra the micromouse needs no cheese, completes maze in under five seconds (video): "

Lab rats beware -- there's a new turbo-charged robotic cousin of yours on the block. This little autonomous fellow, Tetra, has just wowed micromouse hobbyists with a 4.766-second finish time in a maze (which had to be mapped by the micromouse first) in a recent demonstration, beating the previous All Japan Micromouse contest record by a big margin of 1.6 seconds. Sadly, Tetra wasn't the winner of this year's contest as it failed to complete the final Expert Class event -- probably something to do with the lighting conditions which affected its tracking. We can still admire Tetra's awesomeness in the video after the break though, followed by some thoughts from a few micromouse experts.

Continue reading Tetra the micromouse needs no cheese, completes maze in under five seconds (video)

Tetra the micromouse needs no cheese, completes maze in under five seconds (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 12 Dec 2009 08:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Gizmodo's Essential Android Apps 2009 [Android Apps]

Gizmodo's Essential Android Apps 2009 [Android Apps]: "

In a year, Android's gone from shaky upstart to mobile juggernaut. And nowhere is that more apparent than the apps—the Marketplace is positively bursting, with over 14,000 apps. Here are the ones you need, the essentials.

If you want them all on one page, click here.

Surveying the landscape, a few disconcerting trends do emerge. One, Android apps with an iPhone counterpart tend to be the lesser version. Two, fragmentation is already popping up with some apps only available on Android 1.6 and up—leaving out phones like HTC's Hero—or conversely, not yet fully optimized for Android 2.0 or the Droid's higher res screen. Finally, the best software developer for Android is still, far and away, Google—no other developer is even close. We wonder how all of that's gonna change over the next year, which can only be huger for Android.

If we've missed anything or you've got a superior alternative, let us know in the comments, since you vastly outnumber us. By 'us' I mean me.

Sharks with people teeth.

Sharks with people teeth.: "

Sharks with people teeth.

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Fishbowl Brings Facebook to Your Desktop [Downloads]

Fishbowl Brings Facebook to Your Desktop [Downloads]: "

Windows only: Fishbowl, the Facebook client demoed at Microsoft's introduction to Silverlight 4, is now available for download—and it adds quite a few new desktop features to the Facebook experience, including badges, a mini news feed, and more.

At first glance, Fishbowl looks a lot like a reorganized, slightly better looking version of Facebook. Along the top you have the usual sections of Facebook—Home, Profile, Photos, etc.—and on the left sidebar you have options for the window you're in. Navigating these sections is just like Facebook's web site, so it's pretty intuitive.

However, as a desktop client, it adds a few new features that really enhance Facebook's usability. It turns the photos section of Facebook into an almost iPhoto or Picasa-like interface—you can scroll through albums and view pictures as usual, but once in single-photo view you can zoom, view as a slideshow, save the picture, or even print them directly from Fishbowl. You can also upload your own pictures using Fishbowl's built-in photo uploader, which is as easy as dragging and dropping.

Notifications are also handled very nicely, as would be expected from a desktop app—Fishbowl's taskbar icon has support for badges when someone writes on your wall, sends you a message, or comments after you on a post. To view your notifications, you can go into the program and click on the notifications icon, or just right click on the taskbar icon and see them in the jumplist—and open them up in Fishbowl right from there. Also, the Aero Peek view has small buttons that allow you to navigate directly to the Home, Friends, Profile, or Photos sections of Facebook in Fishbowl.

When you're not actively browsing through Facebook (hey, you have to work sometime), Fishbowl has a great mini-mode window that shows you the most recent status update on your news feed—you can also scroll through the last 200 or so entries to catch up if you stepped away—but it's a nice way to keep your news feed open while you're doing other things.

The only issue I had with the client is that in full view mode, some pages (the news feed especially) are a bit slow to load. Not slow enough to make me not want to use it, but slow enough that I tap my foot for a few seconds in mild boredom. Also, for some reason, the news feed view only shows the live feed; it won't show Facebook's new news feed (which attempts, and does a good job I might add, of giving you updates for only the people you stay in contact with). It's definitely a great client, though, and a fantastic use of Silverlight (especially considering it was designed as a trial application to demo Silverlight). Until more people jump on the bandwagon and start making desktop clients for Facebook, it's definitely worth a look-see from avid Facebook users.

Fishbowl is a free download for Windows systems, requires Silverlight to use.

Fishbowl [via Download Squad]