Does DVD ripping damage a DVD player?

[DarkKnight]

just wanna know...

 

[MichaelD]

"Ripping" is a term used to describe the encoding/decoding of the DVD format to a format that can be used on pc. I.E. .avi, etc. It has nothing to do with physically damaging the DVD or the player. All you are doing is manipulating the data that the DVD player puts out.

I'm not the authority on this (where's Viper GTS when you need him? ) but that's the general idea.

 

[gandalf361]

ummm.......
I read on a website (http://www.riphelp.com) that not nessecarily ripping, but when you use a program like flaskmpeg encoder, where it takes the info from dvd and immediately makes a compressed file on your HDD, it might damage your dvd player after awhile. Because the dvd player has to read at slow speeds of 4x or less. (at least that's what I heard off of riphelp.com) But if you just rip the .vob files or whatever to your hdd then I don't think it will hurt it at all. Cause its basically taking the data file and writing it to your HDD. You can ask the people on http://www.divx.com or goto rip help it self and see.

 

[brinstar117]

Aside from normal wear and tear I don't see how.

 

[gdawson6]

It would do just as much damage to you dvdrom as watching the movie would, which isnt any basically.

 

[madthumbs]

Unless you have a processor that doesn't exist in the consumer market, your dvd rom would have to read at below 1x to encode to mpeg4. This would cause strain and heat on the drive. It's recommended to extract to HD to encode. And don't even waste HD space with that POS flask program. Use Nandub or at least Virtual Dub or anything. Flask is crap.

 

[fishingeek]

Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought that when you watch DVDs it plays at 1X anyway.

 

[JJ650]

Well if DVD's were only played at 1x, my 10x DVD player is useless

 

[Bovinicus]

<< Well if DVD's were only played at 1x, my 10x DVD player is useless >>

Not if you rip or take advantage of the higher CD-ROM read speeds. =)

 

[HendrixFan]

DVDs are only played at "1X", but that is just a measure of data, I think its something like 1050KB/s. DVDs may have very slightly higher bitrates than that, but any 2X drive will be able to keep up with any DVD. The advantage of having a faster DVD drive is that you can rip DVDs faster for encoding to DivX or whatever format. Having a faster DVD drive also means the CDROM on it is faster, which is good for installing games or ripping audio CDs. Also, having a faster drive means while watching a DVD it will spin up the data at 10X for example, and not have to read again for about 10 seconds, because the data it pulled off was stored in a memory buffer.

 

[gandalf361]

<< Unless you have a processor that doesn't exist in the consumer market, your dvd rom would have to read at below 1x to encode to mpeg4. This would cause strain and heat on the drive. It's recommended to extract to HD to encode. And don't even waste HD space with that POS flask program. Use Nandub or at least Virtual Dub or anything. Flask is crap. >>



But virtual dub does not extract the movie from dvd to an encoded avi file. I use flask first, then I use virtual dub and it takes it down to a smaller file size. If you can encode directly from a dvd to hdd with virtual dub i would like to know how.

 

[Aosh]

Ok, I'm just jumping into this thread w/ only skimming thru the responses.

But if u mean "ripping" as in decrypting the CSS onto your HD, then no, it won't damage your drive. If you mean "ripping" as in encoding the video into another format through a program that can handle the encrypted files, then it'll more than likely damage your drive. The main reason: overheating.

Depending on ur processor, encoding usually takes VERY long. So if it takes ur computer like say 15-20 hours to do it, then ur drive is about as good as dead.

EDIT: ok, looks like I'm just repeating what people have said before so I'll add some new material. There have been programs in the past that read directly from DVD when encoding. An example that comes to mind is a hacked version of DVD2MPG. I used to use this back in the day for DVD->VCD backups. VCD sux now anyways =P. To get high quality backups, the best way is to go thru multi-staged (and complicated) steps. In such cases, ripping to HD is just about essential.