Just wasted 30 mins trying to get WinXDVD Ripper to work - could only get 5 minute cut. And then I looked at the comments and saw that someone had noted, over a year ago, that the free program was crippled and should be removed from your list. A relatively rare slip-up from a very useful site - but please fix it.

Congrats Techsupportalert! The new design of your website is awesome!

Looks like Freemake Video Converter includes PUPs.

My expeience with WinX DVD Ripper was a failure. I only got to test non-encrypted disks, and it had no problem doing the job - the files were produced and I viewed them - but the program just hanged at "99% completed", and there was no way of shutting it down. Had to reboot. This problem consisted the several times I tried it. Uninstalled it - and then the uninstaller (having completed uninstallation) just hanged... At least I managed to shut it down without having to reboot.
I'm going back to the the HandBrake & DVDFab Passkey combo that has served me very well on my previous system (all Win 7 64-bit).

DVDAux was noticed in the comments so I’ll add my experience with it.

The tests were conducted using a Win-XP-Pro-SP3 system (4 GB of RAM) with an ordinary video card, not one that accelerates video processing. VLC Media Player was used for playback.

Keep in mind DVDAux is version 1.0.0 so it is work in process. Here is what was discovered:

1) No “Support Forum” was located for DVDAux and no support email was found – not a good sign. There is full set of tutorials, actually more than needed, which were listed exhaustively to make locating conversion to any format easy.

2) An encrypted DVD movie was ripped to the hard drive to get the VIDEO_TS folder with its .IFO, .VOB etc. contents. The source was an encrypted (protected) DVD-DL with 7+ GB of material.

3) DVDAux was quite slow (57 min) compared to DVDFAB Passkey Lite (11 min) – both free programs. Both programs used 4-9% of CPU (quad Intel CPU from 2006).

4) DVDAux has a nice menu to select the titles you want to rip. It identified titles 1 through 3 and 13 through 16. Title 1 is the main movie where some problems are noted later. The first time the program was run it converted 30 of 37 files. The ones it excluded were very small .VOB files that would not be used when the converting the movie to another format, and so no loss.

5) Another program, Freemake Video Converter, displayed 20 titles. Again the ones missing from DVDAux were throw-away titles, but it is better when the user decides what to keep or toss.

6) DVDAux was run again and produced the correct 37 of 37 files.

There were other reasons for running DVDAux a 2nd time:

7) The DVD and the VIDEO_TS folder on the hard drive each contain 21 movie files (.VOB):
* Title 1 = Main Movie: 7 files (VTS_01_0.VOB through VTS_01_6.VOB).
VTS_01_0.VOB contains the DVD selection menu
VTS_01_1.VOB through VTS_01_6.VOB are the movie itself
* Titles 2-3, 13-16 = Other Titles: outtakes, interviews, etc. - Ignore these.

A problem was noted with VTS_01_3.VOB in the main movie, which has the director’s commentary over top of the movie audio. This effectively masked the movie soundtrack underneath, and it was present on both rips of the DVD to hard drive by DVDAux.

The expected audio (no commentary) was heard on same file ripped using DVDFab Passkey Lite.

8) Another file in the Main Movie ripped by DVDAux, VTS_01_6.VOB, had French audio instead of English. This was odd because English was selected in the DVDAux menu. It was the only non-English file, but this would ruin about 20 minutes of the movie for non-French speaking movie viewers. No way was found to work around this.

DVDFab Passkey Lite has no selections, but everything ripped to the hard drive as expected.

9) Some tests were done to rip the selected titles to .mp4 and .avi formats. Since the content on the hard drive for DVDAux was not considered suitable, the files ripped by DVDFab Passkey Lite were substituted instead. Both the mp4 and avi files had unwanted subtitles and no way was found to turn them OFF.

The presence of the subtitles is a function of the way DVDAux gathers the files together. The .VOB source files alone have no subtitles.

10) DVDAux has an oddity part nice and part not so much. The nice part is the “open” button on the main screen. This opens the selected folder. Conveniently located just to the left of it is another button labeled “…” that allows selection of new folder, good so far. However when this button is clicked the Folder Window that opens has no selection to “Add a New Folder” so it is necessary to cancel the folder selection and open up the folder first, create a new folder and then select using the “…” button. This is pretty minor, just not intuitive or convenient.

This same window does not remember the last folder opened. Instead the top level menu with Desktop, My Documents, My Computer etc. appears. It requires drilling down through the folders again instead of starting from the one last used.

11) DVDAux should provide an estimate to complete the conversion and report the actual elapsed conversion time. The file size is estimated in the main window as each title is selected.

Overall, DVDAux may become quite useful as it matures. It needs some basic functions fixed and will need to add more features to let the user control operation. An avenue for user feedback is needed