AcidRip for Linux Rips DVDs with Two-Click Ease [Downloads] - 1161th Edition

Linux only: Just over a year ago, we offered a semi-easy way to rip DVDs in Linux to video files. Had we been up on AcidRip, we could’ve saved ourselves about 900 words.

Okay, that’s a bit of overstatement, especially if you like to have a lot of fine-grain control over how your video files turn out. But AcidRip works as a two-click ripper if you want it to. Load a DVD in your drive, start AcidRip, hit the “Load” button in the upper-right corner, then hit “Start” at the bottom. After a good wait, the kind you’re used to if you’ve done this before, an .AVI file of the longest track on your DVD arrives in your home directory, looking like the standard-quality, 700MB-ish video we hear is all over the file sharing networks these days.

From the single command window, though, you can change most of the ways your DVD gets ripped. You can split up a DVD into multiple files for multi-CD rips, change the audio or video codecs, rip a different or multiple video tracks, add subtitles, check out a preview of your final product at the settings you’ve chosen, and save all your tweaks to save time later. AcidRip uses the ubiquitous Mplayer and Mencoder for all its work, and doesn’t sweat an encrypted, commercial-release DVD.

AcidRip is a free download, and can be found in many popular Linux distributions’ repositories.

By Kevin Purdy
Yaab