Recently I developed a new obsession - The West Wing. I have watched almost 4 seasons in about 2 months, and its utterly amazing. I bought all 7 seasons on DVD, which I would watch at home or on my computer when I was on winter break. However, now that I’m back at school, watching is a little more complicated, since I’m not always home and rarely have my DVDs with me. What I do always have with me is my 5G Video iPod, which rarely leaves my side.

I’ve never been one for DVD ripping, since in the early days of DVD ripping were slow and unreliable. However, with processors as fast as they are now, and programs as simple as ever, DVD ripping has now become painless, fast, and easy. The program that I currently use is called Handbrake, which lets you start ripping your dvds in seconds, only requiring a few configuration steps. Handbrake by itself lets you rip your dvds to both iPod format and not, using either the ffmpeg or h.264 plugin at any combination of frame rate and resolution. However, the simplest way to rip your dvds to iPod is to use a simplified version of Handbrake called Instant Handbrake. Instant Handbrake (same site) has you ripping your DVDs to iPod format in seconds.

The interesting part writing about this right now is that development for Handbrake has almost completely stopped. The program works well and has very few bugs, but no new features have been added in a long time. However, several new developers have picked up where the Handbrake developers left off, with a new program called MediaFork. MediaFork has several new features that Handbrake does not (and will never) offer, but it is currently in beta.

If you are interested in backing up your DVDs either to your harddrive, iPod, or both, I highly recommend you use Handbrake and keep an eye on MediaFork. For those of you who already use HandBrake, what configuration settings have you found that produce the best results?