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Continuing this little series of mine about DVD ripping and encoding software to take your movies with you, today I’ve got Aplus DVD Ripper Professional up on the testing block. Is it any good? Well not really honestly… In my time with it I’ve found it doesn’t quite work the way ‘I want it to’ and that’s what counts right? The end users needs are what should be taken into consideration above all else.

I ran the program three times to convert my movie to PPC format, all three times I ran into problems and virtually an un-viewable end product. After three tries I figured I wasted more than enough of my time with this product and it was time to move on to something else… but continue on to check it out and see exactly why I would avoid this product..

Before we get into the ‘review’ of this product, here’s a bit on info about it from their site:

Aplus DVD Ripper Professional – Convert your DVD movies to DivX, XviD, AVI, MPEG, MP4, iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, Youtube’s Video, PSP, Cell Phone, Zune, Pocket PC.
What’s new in lastest version
1. Support any dvd movie even copyright protected dvds.
2. With the newest dvd ripper technology for support  any DVD movie. no loss of quality in 30 minutes.
3. With the xvid / h.264 encoder ensure compress with high speed and no loss movie quality.
4. Support Export mpeg, avi, ipod, iphone, apple tv, youtube, psp, pocket pc, zune, cell phone video format.

If you wish to read the rest of the information more in-depth you can go HERE to do so.

So, first up is the interface, when you run the program you are greeted with a fairly plain interface, this actually bodes well for the product, plain pretty much means easier right? Across the bottom of the interface are your choices of formats in the form of icons, for each type you can port your movie over to.

Of course I’m picking the PocketPC format for my uses, when you click the icon a new menu pops up with choices of things you can change. When you change one thing, the profile becomes ‘Customize Setting’ the only thing I changed was the output format to AVI type video file as I like this type because the end result file is usually smaller but with very good quality.

Next up of course we need to load our movie, click ‘open’ from the top menu bar and navigate to your DVD drive, APlus DVD Ripper Pro will load the movie for you, then you can select the Video file from the drop down menu on the right side and the Audio source as well. Depending on the DVD you might have a few choices with these menus actually, but as a rule you’ll want the largest video file as that is usually the movie.

After your done with that just click start and go find something else to do, Xillisoft took over an hour to complete the process, but Aplus only took 36 minutes to rip and convert the DVD, a big plus for this software really, faster is always better..usually.

I found that Aplus used less CPU that Xillisoft as well, peaking at 47% at times but with an average of 27% CPU usage. Mine you though, I’m using a quad core CPU as well, so it’s essentially using one core for the whole process, and almost two at times. Compare that to the 42% average of CPU usage of Xillisoft, now this can be a good thing or a bad thing really, depending on what else you have to do with your computer the less CPU usage could mean better performance, but then again why not utilize the CPU and use it’s power for the conversion process?!

I mentioned I tried this software three times, and each time I ran into a weird error that I couldn’t find reference for on the Aplus website, each time the error popped up at 98% complete and stopped the conversion process until you clicked OK, but when I clicked OK the process resumes and finished.

I thought maybe it might be some sort of protection on the DVD, but then  why would other programs work correctly? So it couldn’t be that could it?

Once completed the end file was approximately 280MB in size, a nice small portable size that will allow you to take a few movies with you if need be. It says 280,028KB but when transferred it’s 273MB in size really.

So I transferred it to my phone and started to watch it, the video is fine, but there is all kinds of funky background noise to the audio track, weird high-pitched pops and pings types of noises. This background noise isn’t very loud really, but just loud enough to be annoying, honestly it’s not bad when playing through the speaker but when you put headphones on you’ll really notice it. The video and audio is in sync though so that’s something anyway.

Overall though, the end experience is just sub-par really, Aplus DVD Ripper Professional produces an end result that is really un-viewable, well not un-viewable, you can watch it and the video is clear and smooth, but what’s point of watching a movie if the audio is messed up?!

Now I didn’t play with the other possible formats, so the end product of those might be different and possibly better, but as I said in the beginning of this little review, what’s the point if I can’t output into my preferred format?

If I had to give this product a score it would be like 2.5 out of 5 and that’s being generous really, but taking into account the ease of use and the quick conversion time it does get some points.

but my personal advice is to stay away from this one…

Kristofer (33 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook