We often need to rip DVDs for events in order to make simple edits, or play the video files from a computer. Handbrake and VLC are both free and available for Mac OS X, and both do a decent job, but I find a lot of the settings are easy to get wrong (especially bitrate, interlacing parameters, etc), which can lead to a poor quality result.

A surprisingly straightforward alternative is to use a professional package which doesn’t support ripping “VOB” files (the MPEG2 video files stored on a video DVD) out of the box.

If your DVD is unencrypted (as with most “show” DVDs), you can just open the disc in Finder, copy the “Video_TS” folder to the desktop, and rename the contained .VOB files, to a .MPG extension. Finder will prompt you to confirm that you’re changing the extension of the file – click OK.

You will now find that you can import the MPEG2 files from the VIDEO_TS folder straight into Adobe Media Encoder, and use the various high-quality encoding options available to normal video files.

This should also work with Compressor, although I haven’t had a chance to try it.

Adobe Media Encoder comes included with Premiere Pro CS4 and CS5, and most of the Adobe production packages/suites.