Best VirtualDub Alternative to Rip DVD on Windows and Mac

If you are looking for a free solution to copy or backup DVD, Handbrake and VirtualDub can be the best options for you. For those pople who are quite familiar with the steps of ripping DVD with Handbrake, you may have more interest in copying DVD with VirtualDub, the following article will cover this topic with great details.

How to rip DVD with VirtualDub?

VirtualDUB is a bit different to Handbrake, it doesn't need installing, just extract the archive and run ‘VirtualDub.exe'. However, you do need to separately download the MPEG2 plugin (required to decrypt DVDS), download files below:

VirtualDub and MPEG2 Plugin

When you extract VirtualDub, there will be a "plugins" folder, copy the content of the MPEG2 archive into this folder.

When you're ready to rip your DVD, start VirtualDub.exe and accept the licence agreement (obviously only if you agree with it). Then click File > Open Video File - Now you need to navigate to your DVD and click VTS_01_1.VOB (this is usually the first video file on a DVD, then tick the option ‘Ask for extended options' before clicking ‘Open'. On this new dialogue box, tick ‘Open multiple VOB files as one virtual file'. VirtualDUB will now analyse the DVD and this may take some time.

Next, click the ‘Video' menu option and then ‘Compression...'. You'll be presented with a list of options for compressing your video, in this example I'll use the DivX codec. Unfortunately this also isn't included with VirtualDUB by default. So if you don't see it in this list you'll need to download and install it. You can get the file HERE, you'll need to install it (when doing so, you'll only need the ‘DivX Plus Codec Pack'), restart computer if needed, reopen VirtualDUB and it should now appear in the compression dialogue box. ‘DivX x.x.x Codec' (not Decoder).

Now the process is much the same as in Handbrake, click: File > Save as AVI... then choose where you want to save the video file

VirtualDub Alternative to Rip DVD

VirtualDub can be a reliable software that offers good quality when performing DVD copying or backup process, however, we still need to find a good VirtualDub Alternative to Rip DVD due to the following reason:
- VirtualDub is not easy to operate and needs a lot of complicated configuration to get started
- The interface is not intuitive
- VirtualDub can only rip the entire DVD with one click option

Fortunately, there are some good VirtualDub alternatives that are available on both Windows and Mac for you to rip DVD. To better understand the main features and functions of those programs, the following parts will offer a table with detailed comparison parameters for you as a reference:

From above lists, we can see that Pavtube ByteCopy for Windows/Mac can be the best VirtualDub Alternative to rip DVD in the following aspects:
- Friendly user interface, the whole DVD ripping process can be completed with just few clicks
- Remove all DVD copy and region protection automatically in the background without installing any third-party decryption software
- Works with not only DVD disc but also Video_TS folder and IFO/ISO image files
- Automatically select the main DVD movie (the one with largest file size and longest duration) for you
- Make a full disc or main movie copy of DVD
- Rip DVD to various different file formats or device and porgram preset profile formats
- Edit DVD by flipping, rotating, trimming, cropping, adding watermark, applying special rendering effects, etc
- Merge or split DVD titles
- Set DVD subtitles by extracting desired internal subtitels, enable forced subtitles or adding external srt/ass/ssa subtitles to DVD movies.
- Customize output DVD profile settings like video codec, bit rate, frame rate, channels or audio codec, bit rate, sample rate, channels, etc to get better output video and audio quality.