Handbrake, which I recommend for ripping DVDs, has just reached the 1.0 milestone. And it only took 13 years.
“After more than 13 years of development, the HandBrake Team is delighted to present HandBrake 1.0.0,” the team announced over the holiday weekend. “Thank you to all of our many contributors over the years for making HandBrake what it is today.”
Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday — and get free copies of Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (normally $9.99) as a special welcome gift!
"*" indicates required fields
In an interesting coincidence, I just installed Handbrake again over the past week, for the first time in several months. As you might imagine, my DVD ripping needs have declined over the years, but I received up a “Rick Steves” TV series for Christmas and wanted to make it available to myself digitally. I am now curious to see that the presents have changed, and dramatically, in version 1.0.
You can learn more about DVD ripping with Handbrake in my article How to Rip DVD Videos, which I’ll likely be revisiting soon, as per my “revisiting the fundamentals” thing for 2017. Blu-Ray ripping is, alas, far more complicated. You can use Handbrake, but it’s not ideal on a number of levels, especially if you want soft captioning. Though, again, I’ll be revisiting this topic soon.
There’s also some official documentation now. Amazing what you can accomplish in 13 years. 🙂
As a historical aside, I’ve been using Handbrake for over 10 years. I don’t recall the exact timing, but back when we did our first home swap (in August 2006, in Paris), I recall discussing this with a friend there, and at the time I had to rip DVDs on an Apple iBook. (I think because the decoding stuff was available in Handbrake only on the Mac, but I can’t recall.) Today, those 720 x 480 rips would seem as tragically SD quality as you’d imagine, and as I’ve sold off/given away my DVD collection, I’ve stopped even backing them up.
Anyway. Interesting news.