Review: WonderFox DVD Ripper Pro 4.2


I was recently given the opportunity to review WonderFox DVD Ripper, for copying DVDs. I believe everyone has reached a point where they recognize the importance of being able to back up their DVD collection, but more importantly being able to enjoy their media collection anywhere they wanted. Being able to enjoy your media collection anywhere, means that you have to be able to rip your DVDs into a standard format that a software package can use to transmit over the Internet or put in a format that can be used on a portable device, like MP4.
When you purchase DVDs or Blu-ray DVDs, sometimes these purchases come with ultraviolet versions of those movies, but because the complications and the licensing and the accessibility,  plus the issue of redundant streaming of the same movie; it's a hassle. It's easier just to encode your own movies and take them anywhere and do what you want to with them. This is where WonderFox DVD Ripper comes into play.
I believe most people understand that DVDs by default cannot be just copied, they have encryption on them that keep them from being copied and one of the benefits of this software is that it allows you to bypass those encryption schemes.
WonderFox DVD Ripper is a software package that can be downloaded from their website. The downloaded version of the software is roughly 16 MB; which is very easy on the bandwidth meter. If you have a high-speed connection, which most people do, downloading 16 MB doesn't take very long at all. Installation of the software is very straightforward. Does no deceptive installations or hidden agendas behind the installation of the software; mainly the installation is default choices all the way through.

Initial thoughts and impressions

My initial impressions of the WonderFox DVD Ripper was that the user interface was very straightforward. His only three main options when you open the software. Loading a DVD disc, loading an ISO image and pointing to a DVD folder. If you're familiar with copying DVDs, you'll be familiar with having DVD folders somewhere on your system. The one thing on those about the software packages that the encoding features are very simple. You decide how high-quality or low-quality you like your videos to be exported.
There's other software packages on the Internet that can be overly complicated and can be intimidating to some, but this software makes the encoding process/ripping process very simplistic.
From the very beginning, the only thing that you have to do is choose where the source information is, WonderFox DVD Ripper will automatically detect all the video files that are available and select the largest video file by default. On the right-hand side of the software, you choose the export format that you want. In my particular case, I prefer to export to MP4 which is generally accepted as the default standard; it's compatible with just about everything.
At the bottom of the screen, you have the option to choose where you want the output of the video encoding to go. The only issue you have to worry about is if you have enough space the whole being encoded video. Most current systems have at least a 1 TB hard drive; this really shouldn't be an issue. And the last thing to do is click on the run button in the bottom right-hand corner. It's very simple.



High Points
The user interface is very clean. The options to encode the video are very simple, very easy to get to. In my evaluation and testing of the software I found that the software was able to encode an entire DVD in roughly 30 minutes. This testing was directly from the DVD. Obviously, if the operator RE has an ISO image of the DVD, I would suspect that encoding a ISO DVD would take much less time; and I'm sure that the same would apply for a DVD folder.
Accessing information directly from a hard drive is always going to be faster than accessing information from a DVD drive.

Another nice feature of this software is the ability to crop the area that you want to encode. Some DVD ripping software packages don't give you the option to get rid of the black bars or encode just the areas that you want.

WonderFox DVD Ripper has an option in the software to EDIT the video before you start the encoding process. In addition to being able to remove the black bars from the DVD encodings, you can encode the DVDs with specific video filters; as for instance adding a video effect to make the DVD look older [as shown above].

Low Points
WonderFox DVD Ripper has the ability to choose source locations, like the DVD, ISOs or a DVD folder. What was hardly missing about the software package was the ability to drag and drop the ISO files and the DVD folder. You could grab a ISO file and drag it into the software and the icon would indicate that you're dragging a file or folder, but when you let go of that source information, the application would not do anything with it; it would force you to go through the browsing process. Using the standard file browsing or folder browsing for source information is a bit irritating; having the ability to drag-and-drop source files would be a very nice addition to this software package.
It may seem odd to some people, but I was a little bit disappointed that the software package didn't have the ability to export to an ISO format. WonderFox DVD Ripper has the ability to read ISOs, but doesn't have the ability to create them. It may seem awfully redundant, but someone may want to be able to read their existing DVD and create an ISO of the DVD as a backup.
[important] I would like to note that during the review process, I contacted the developer about these low points in the application and it's very possible that with the next release of this software package that the application will have those features in it. [/important]

Special Mentions

One thing I really liked about this software package was that the developer had the foresight to understand that some people may not understand exactly what all the special settings do for video and audio encoding. The software comes with a lot of preset encoding options for various devices and other exports.
The benefit to this is that for people that don't have technical backgrounds or don't want to mess with the finer details, they just want things to work; when choosing the output profile in WonderFox DVD Ripper, they can choose the format and device that they want to use.
To be honest, there were so many different profiles, I never found the need to create a custom profile.

My Conclusions
I have used other DVD ripping software packages in the past. Some software packages are more mature and some are very clunky; and some software packages that do DVD ripping can be outright complicated— making it very intimidating to even approach ripping a DVD.
I think this software package approach is the process of ripping a DVD in one of the most straightforward manner as possible; you choose the source, you choose the format and you choose the destination— that's it. The existing export profiles make it even easier to choose how you want to carry your media.
WonderFox DVD Ripper is a really good software package that does exactly what it needs to do.
If you're in the process of trying to figure out how to copy your DVD collection, you can try WonderFox DVD Ripper Speedy without charge of any kind and get an idea of the quality of their software.. Their main website will indicate the current price of the software, but as of the time of this article, the website was running a special for half the normal price of the DVD ripping software [which was great].

a Rafflecopter giveaway
Credits and links
http://www.videoconverterfactory.com/
This article is being cross posted to LEHSYS.com.

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