The Best Free DVD Ripper for Copying Protected DVDs

 With a free DVD ripper, you won’t shell out any money and you can copy your protected physical movie collection and digitize them for more convenient streaming.

The best free DVD ripper is WinX DVD Ripper – an free tool that can handle any type of DVDs, including 99-title DVDs, non-readable DVDs, damaged DVDs, fake playlist DVDs. It saves movies in virtually any format. Handbrake gives good performance in terms of speed. However, it can't rip discs protected by DRM without third party help. MakeMKV can handle some DRM discs, but it always pops up errors when processing fake playlist DVDs.

The best free DVD rippers review:

WinX DVD Ripper

Handbrake

MakeMKV 

Check for detailed information about copying protected DVDs.

WinX DVD Ripper

 Operating system: Windows, macOS

WinX DVD Ripper can handle DVDs that are encrypted, region-locked or unplayable. It can back up DVDs to ISO, TS folder, copy main title/full title, and digitize DVDs to MP4, AVI, MOV, WMV, etc. with lots of preset profiles so you can watch your favorite movies on a phone or tablet. The ripper supports hardware acceleration and multi-core processing.

HandBrake

Operating system: Windows, macOS, Linux

 By default, there's no support for bypassing copy-protection, but this is something you can get around with a little research - install libdvdcss to handle some DRM discs.

As with other programs, there are a number of presets ready for you to choose from, but you can also manually tailor each ripping session if you prefer. If you're working with ISO images or disc folders, it's possible to queue up multiple encoding jobs to run consecutively to save having to be around when each finishes. The sheer level of control makes HandBrake well worth a try.

MakeMKV

Operating system: Windows, macOS

If you've used free DVD ripping software before, MakeMKV might look a little familiar – it bears more than a passing resemblance to DVD Decrypter. As well as handling DVDs, the program, is also capable of ripping Blu-ray discs, and the process works in exactly the same way in each case (although it's worth noting that Blu-ray ripping is only be free while the program is in beta).

MakeMKV is easy to use. There's no messing about, no complex configuration – just analyze, rip and go. However, it only copies DVD to digital file in MKV format. MakeMKV always shows fake playlist error when processing protected DVDs, particularly Liongsgate DVDs.