MacDVDRipper Pro 5

I was a fan of RipIt and DVDRemaster a couple of years ago, I had a nice workflow going where I could convert my DVD TV series discs into MP4s for the Apple TV  (We have a lot of discs).  I discovered MDRP since then, and I have been very happy with it, just a few clicks to rip and convert in decent quality.  I love to see an encoder max out all of my cores, too 🙂

(As a side note, it seems that DVDRemaster got purchased by the company selling MDRP, so I suppose it’s a natural upgrade path for me)

Well, v5 came out a couple of weeks ago, but I couldn’t see much that was powerfully compelling about the new features – all they said was that it was now 64-bit and embedded switchable soft-subtitles.  And something very vague about converting after the fact.  Would that matter to me?

I decided to do a face-off with a single TV season disc.  The metrics here have “buckshot accuracy” but give me an idea.  I ripped 4 episodes in v4 and the demo of v5 and compared the time-stamps… it almost appeared like v5 was twice as fast.  Yes, about 12 minutes between two episodes in v4 and 6 in v5.  WOW.  Why are they not advertising considerable speed gains?  I know the computer could have been doing a bunch more during the first encode, but surely not that much!  I ran through a couple more box sets to be sure… and yup, I can finish a disc of about 4 episodes in roughly half an hour.  Even the fans on my iMac blew at high speed for the v4 conversion and remained quiet for the v5.

This is a totally worthwhile upgrade just for that rough test.  But, I discovered the other killer feature.  Previously, you could not use .dvdmedia packages as a source – which was a drag if I wanted to distribute the ripping task to other machines using say, RipIt.  This version though, uses them just fine!  Yeah!  I didn’t find a big improvement in distributing that process though, since the convert straight from disc is so fast it’s almost not worth ripping to an image and converting from that.

The upgrade was $10 and totally worth it.