Two months ago, I bough myself a new ipad, cool and cute, really love it. I want to watch my DVD collections on ipad other than buying them from itunes store, which I think it is waste of money. I did some research online; found that I need some utility program to do the job. Most of the programs called DVD Ripper.

DVD ripper is a software program that facilitates copying the content of a DVD to a hard disk drive. They are mainly used to transfer video on DVDs to different formats, to edit or back up DVD content, and for converting DVD video for playback on media players and mobile devices. Some DVD rippers include additional features, such as the ability to decrypt DVDs, remove copy preventions and make disks unrestricted and region-free.

Here is step by step guide on how to rip DVD to ipad using handbrake.

1. Handbrake is an open source and free DVD ripper, supporting various operating systems. Download HandBrake according to your computer OS and install it.

2. Insert a DVD and launch HandBrake. If HandBrake doesn't recognize the DVD as a source automatically, you may have to click "Browse" and direct HandBrake to your DVD drive.

3. HandBrake will analyze the DVD and let you choose the title and chapters you want to rip for your ipad (in general, you'll want the first title and every chapter). You can get an idea of which title is the main DVD title by choosing the title duration that matches the movie's playtime.

4. Click the "Presets" menu in Windows, or the "Presets" button on the top right of the HandBrake window on the Mac. You'll see several presets; choose the iPad preset.

5. Now just click the "Encode Video" button (Windows) or Start button (Mac) and sit back while HandBrake rips the DVD to one big file. This can take a while, so you won't be able to rip a DVD on your way out the door to the airport. Make sure you plan ahead.

6. When HandBrake finishes ripping the DVD, drag the file into iTunes for syncing to your ipad.

Note:

HandBrake Windows doesn't do a very good job on ripping DVDs to ipad format, just support MP4 and MKV video format. If you want to rip your DVD to other popular format, such as AVI ,you need some other software instead. Here, I'd like to recommend dvd to ipad converter. This piece of software can merge several DVD chapters into a single file, trim the video length, extract sound tracks from DVD as audio file, support M4V, MP4, MKV, AVI, FLV, WMV, and a lot more output video/audio formats.