Wondershare DVD Ripper Platinum Reviewed

Today I’m back with the 4^th in this series of video converting and ripping programs that will let you take your video with you on the iPod. This one is called Wondershare DVD Ripper Platinum and it’s the most expensive one yet, coming in at $39 for it. Having a high price though might not be a bad thing if the program worked well and offered good features. Wondershare is fast, easy to use, and it does give the user the ability to crop, add effects and even watermark the final video, but is that all worth the price?

Info:

Wondershare DVD Ripper Platinum

Support iPod, Zune, iPhone, Apple TV, PSP, Xbox 360, PS3, Archos, iRiver PMP Player, Creative Zen, PMP, MP4/MP3 Player, Smart Phone…

Convert DVD to MP4, DVD to AVI, DVD to MOV, DVD to FLV, DVD to MPEG, DVD to 3GP, DVD to WMV…

Extract audio tracks from all kinds of DVDs (DVD Video and DVD Audio) and rip DVD audio tracks to MP3, M4A, AC3, AAC, WMA…

Support video trimming, video cropping, video effect adjustment and video file merging.

Merge several chapters into one file or just rip DVD by chapters or titles.

Price: $39.00

What’s in the Box?:

Again this is a download, so no box shots for you, but again I’m using Shaun of the Dead and my iPod nano 4^th to test this out.

Installation, Performance and Comparison:

The instructions are right there in the main window when you start up the program, makes life a bit easier that way.

To select the format you want to convert to there is a pop-up menu box that appears, in there you’ll find many options to choose from, pretty much everything is covered including User Defined or Custom.

Pop the DVD in your drive and hit the ‘Add’ button at the top left, everything gets loaded in to the program, problem is that everything also gets checked or selected automatically for you. You’ll have to go and uncheck all of the boxes is you only want the main movie. Shaun of the Dead had over 40 boxes checked that I had to individually uncheck.

Wondershare has three options that the others I’ve looked at don’t, hitting the ‘Edit’ buttons at the top opens up a separate windows with three options for Cropping, Effects and even Watermarking the movie.

Before you start the ripping process you can hit the ‘Settings’ buttons at the bottom of the screen next to the ‘Profile’ box. Here you can adjust the settings of the profile you selected if you wish, but, sadly, I don’t see an options for changing the aspect ratio though..

Once you’ve edited the movie and made any adjustments you can hit the ‘Start’ button and the movie will start to rip and convert. You can watch a preview or not and you’ll see progress bars as well.

I checked the Task Manager and I found that the program only used about 34% CPU Usage of my Quad Core CPU, so it can’t utilize a quad core, but most can’t from what I can tell.

The whole process took 14:38 to complete which is pretty fast overall, but the output size was rather large coming in at 712MB in size.

I didn’t take any pictures of the movie playing on my iPod this time around, but I can tell you the quality was excellent, and the audio was synced with the video. Of course though since you can’t change the aspect ratio you’ll be stuck with wide screen on the iPod, making it look much smaller than it already in on the small screen.

Conclusion:

Wondershare DVD Ripper Platinum is not a bad choice if you’re looking for an easy to use program that includes some nice features and will allow you to rip to most any format. I think for the price it’s worth it if you’ll utilize all of the features and will be doing more than just converting or ripping to the iPod.

If you just need to rip movies for the iPod, then I’d go with one of the free versions I already looked at.

Pros:

+Fairly easy to use

+Also give you the ability to crop, watermark or add effects

+Relatively fast

Cons:

-Expensive

-No ability to change aspect ratio

-Automatically selects everything on the DVD

-Large final file size