RIPPING WITH DVD SHRINK 

DVD Shrink is the easiest program out there to use. It'll take you no time at all to get the hang of it. It will rip most movies, but a few films are double copyright protected, which means that you may need a paid-for decryptor running in the background to remove all false menus. (I have not had much trouble with that, so it is probably an unnecessary expense.)

Here is basically what you need to do:

+ Put the movie you want to copy into your DVD drive.

+ Open DVD Shrink and hit "Open Disk." In my case, it is Mary Queen of Scots.

DVDS will "load" the movie. This will take from two to four minutes. It is reading the disk and loading the programming into your computer's memory for easy access. 

Once it is loaded, you will see these options:

+ Hit the Re-author tab, and it will look like this:

+ Your movie will have the correct running time. In this case, it is largest file on the disk. In the case of television episodes, you may have to highlight and slide the bar in the preview screen to find out if that is the file you want.

+ Drag your movie file over onto the left side, above the preview panel. With the movie file still highlighted, click the "Compression settings" tab. Leave the audio boxes checked or you will not have any sound with your movie file! But uncheck the subtitles boxes.

+ Now hit the backup key. It will ask you where you want to save the files. Choose somewhere in your My Videos or My Documents folder where you can find them again easily. Leave your computer alone while it rips the files. This can take anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours!

If you have a burner hooked up to your computer, often it will pop out the tray upon completion and ask you to insert a blank disk. Do not do this! Click the cancel button, and it will inform you that it has burned nothing, but placed the .vob files into the appropriate folder.

Next, you need to transform your VOB filesto AVI!