How to rip DVD to iTunes and why Apple won't let it?

iTunes can rip a CD and make it rapidly available for you to listen to on your iPhone/iPod or stream around your house via other computers, or AppleTV/Airtunes and a variety of third party products. What about rip DVD to iTunes?

One would think that rip DVD to iTunes wouldn’t be that big of a challenge for Apple, it just have to be locked into a proprietary, DRM-encoded iTunes-only format. You’d insert the disc into your PC, and iTunes would ask how you’d like to rip DVD to iTunes: optimized for Apple TV streaming or optimized for iPod/iPhone. Once it was in iTunes, the files could be transferred within the entire Apple products: the PC desktop (Windows and Mac iTunes libraries), the living room (Apple TV), and the portable realm (iPod and iPhone).

Sounds great, right? Unfortunately, I don’t think Apple will let the ripping DVD to iTunes thing happen anytime soon.

First, The Hollywood big movie studio will kill every product that hurt their copyright protection, even if their position isn’t legally tenable, they could try to tie down Apple in expensive litigation.

Secondly–and more importantly–it’s not really in Apple’s financial interest to add DVD to iTunes feature. The company wants to expand, not shrink the demand for its online iTunes Store: Apple makes nothing if you rip DVD to iTunes, but it (and its studio partners) earns from $3 to $15 per click, depending if you rent or buy. The company isn’t likely to kill off that revenue stream anytime soon.

Let’s take a look at the RealNetworks’ RealDVD software–which allows users to legally rip DVD movies to their PC hard drives. It was released in Oct 2008, and the most telling comment:
“Why I can’t rip DVD to iTunes? I need it for my portable device.” Indeed, Real’s product lets you move ripped DVD movies between a total of five licensed PCs, there’s no provision for network streaming, and no support for transferring the movies to portable devices."

It completed proved that costumers have lost their interesting on this DVD ripping software, and by now, the Hollywood big movie studio and RealNetworks are still in court.

How to rip DVD to iTunes with third party software?

This is the last reason why Apple won’t add DVD ripping feature to iTunes, savvy consumers would say:“We are already doing the DVD to iTunes thing.” Yes, there are so many freeware/shareware can rip DVD to iTunes now,Aimersoft DVD ripper, [URL=“http://handbrake.fr”]Handbrake, some of these third party software actually do a good job. You can rip DVD to almost any video formats and then do whatever you’d like with these files–including watch it on your PC, stream it to an Apple TV, or transfer it to your portable devices iPod/iPhone/Zune/PSP/etc, and perhaps Apple is happy enough with the status quo. It’s less expensive for them that way, and doesn’t offend the same media companies Apple has deals with for iTunes rentals and downloads.