When I travel, I love to bring movies to watch on the plane and in the hotel, but I hate having to carry the original DVDs with me. Not only am I afraid to lose them (at $20-30 a pop, it gets expensive), but I also don't like the extra weight and "stuff" to have to put in my road warrior bag. To work around this, I use an application called "MacTheRipper".

Before I explain what this application does, let me emphasize that this application is not to be used to make illegal copies (but it's fine if you are copying your own DVD). OK, now that I have that out of the way, let's talk about the fun stuff.

The first thing you need to do is place the original DVD into your drive. Once you have done that, make sure that you have quit out of DVD player (if it opens automatically for you). Next, open MacTheRipper. When you open MacTheRipper, it will look like this:

You will notice that it will scan for your DVD, and show you the name of it when it has successfully found it. The first time you rip a movie, you will need to set a location. I have chosen my Desktop because it's the easiest for me to quickly find the movie to play when it's time. You may also need to set the de-Macrovision option (Macrovision is the encryption method used by the film industry to protect their intellectual property) and a few other settings. Usually, keeping the default settings works fine. Now that you have set your options, it's time to rip!

Ripping a full-length movie takes about 30 minutes, so give it some time. Once it's complete, take out the disc, and give it a try. To play the movie, open DVD player. When it's open, go to File | Open DVD Media... Simply browse to the new folder created by MacTheRipper (typically the name of the movie), and select the folder inside called "VIDEO_TS" (this is the folder that actually contains the movie content).

That's all there is too it!! To use MacTheRipper, you can download it here for free.