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Ok, so I mentioned this quite a while ago, but here’s the first in my series of video encoding or re-encoding programs. There are many out there to choose from and I’ve got several of them to look at, both free and pay. I’m not going to go in major depth with all of this, I’m trying to look at these as someone who is ‘new’ to this sort of thing and wants to take their movies with them. I want to mainly focus on the ease of use and the time it takes to convert your movies to portable format, but of course we’ll focus on end quality as well as that is a part of the overall experience.

First up in this series is DVD Ripper Ultimate from Xilisoft, I’m not going to copy and paste all of the information from their web site, if you wish to read more you can stop over HERE and read the detailed specs and features if you wish.

So continue on to learn what I did about Xilisoft DVD Ripper Ultimate…

…and here is some basic information from the Xilisoft site about DVD Ripper Ultimate:

Xilisoft DVD Ripper Ultimate is powerful and easy-to-use DVD ripping software with the ability of ripping DVD to almost all video and audio formats, such as AVI, MPEG, WMV, DivX, MP4, H.264/AVC, RM, MOV, M4V, XviD, 3GP, MP3, WMA, WAV, RA, M4A, AAC, AC3, OGG, etc. With its powerful compatibility for iPod, iPhone, PSP, Apple TV, etc., Xilisoft DVD Ripper Ultimate enables you to rip DVD to various portable media players supported formats.

Additionally, it can help you clip video segment, crop video size, edit video effects, adjust subtitle, and add video watermark, to get the customized DVD audio and video files.

Price: $55.00

First when you open the program you are greeted with an attractive user interface with basic instructions on what you need to do to get started. On the top you have drop down menus like you find in most applications, on the side you have choices for audio and video selections. Under the main window is a graphical icon bar as well for creating your movie and editing it as well. Under that you can select the profile of the type of movie you wish to create and select the output directory as well.

When you decide what movie you want you can select the profile for what type of movie you want to create or device specific choice. There are many other choices so this software can actually be used for many devices and even just general DVD ripping as well.

For our purposes we’ll want to select ‘Windows Mobile’ and then ‘General Pocket PC Video.’ Once selected the information is filled in on the right side to let you know the size and video/audio quality of the outputted movie.

For my testing I’m using one of my all-time favorite movies, Stargate, and it’s the Ultimate Edition so it’s approximately 119 Minutes run time. Once you load the movie you’re given the contents of the DVD with check boxes next to the items, of course we only want the movie so we’ll uncheck everything but the largest file or duration which would be our movie.

It also shows you the approximate size of the movie when finished as well, 834mb is pretty large really, so most people aren’t going to want to use that much space for one movie. So I went back and choose a different profile for creating my movie. I choose General Pocket PC – Minimal Size, which gave me an approximate size of 400mb, much better. Of course I also changed the video size from Auto to 320×240 so it would fit my phones screen.

Once you’ve configured everything hit start and wait, and wait… it took a total of 60 minutes and about 35 seconds to complete the ripping/conversion process. I’ve got a quad core system, an Intel C2Q6600 and I decided to check CPU usage to see what was going on.. My CPU usage peaked at 61%, and had an average of 42% usage during the process of ripping the movie.

Once completed the final movie was about 340mb, not bad at all, you can fit quite a few movies on a 4gig card if you wish at this size.

But the quality was sub-par, the audio syncing was off at points and it wasn’t full screen, it still had a wide screen look to it with bars at top and bottom, there was also faint audio noise in the background as well that was not from the movie itself. It was choppy as well, and it has nothing to do with video drivers either, I’ve watched other movies on my Tilt with little or no choppiness to them.

So I decided to go back and change a few of the settings, I went to General Pocket PC -Excellent Quality, and I changed video from letterbox to full screen as well.

so I started the entire process over again and this time it took 73 minutes and about 30 seconds to complete the process. The output file is now almost a full gig, coming it at 992mb in size.  Too big for real portability, but I wanted to see what happened when I changed it to excellent quality.

In the end though it still produces a file that is very large and just too big to be portable when used on excellent quality settings and that’s what you have to use to get a decent viewable movie from this software.

So the actual movie was still choppy, but the audio seemed synced correctly this time and there was no background noise either, but it still wasn’t at full screen it still looks wide screen.

So if I had to give this product a rating it would be a 3 1/2 out of 5 score.

That score is for the end product for someone using DVD Ripper Ultimate who isn’t very technical savvy. If someone who really doesn’t know what they’re doing opens this program and uses the ’stock’ setting for their device they’re going to be very disappointed at the end product.

If someone buys this thinking it’s going to be a ‘quick-fix’ for making movies to take with them then they’re going to be sadly disappointed. Honestly the software is advertised this way though, it’s a bit misleading really, it’s going to take a lot more than pushing a button and poof you’re done to get a good quality movie to take with you.

However though you can fully go in and make use of the available customization options if you desire and if you know how to, this does make DVD Ripper Ultimate a decent product for those that have experience with this type of thing.

Personally I would go in and fully customize the settings and output to AVI format or Divx which gives you a smaller file with near DVD quality. The sizes for a full movie in this format are much smaller, between 200mb and 300 mb, this way you get the quality and portability we desire with our devices.

If you’re interested in this type of software, I can’t recommend it if you don’t know what you’re doing. From what I’ve read a lot of our readers are new to the Tilt and new to the whole PPC mobile phone scene so I think many fall into the category of ‘newbie’ in this respect. There are other options out there that are better and just as easy that produce better results which I’ll be looking at shortly…

Kristofer (33 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook