15-Minute Reviews :: Acala DVD Ripper Professional v5.6.1

Today’s 15-Minute Review is on Acala DVD Ripper Professional version 5.6.1 by Acala Software, Inc. – An application to rip your DVDs to a variety of formats.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Acala DVD Ripper Professional is an easy to use program which rips your DVD movies to avi, mpeg, mp4, wmv, 3gp formats. With Acala DVD Ripper Professional, you will be able to copy your favorite DVD movies to your hard disk.”

Quick Pros

• Interface is good looking and fairly easy to use
• Plenty of output formats and settings for formats
• Video portion of the video is good

Quick Cons

• Manual cuing and recording is awkward at best until setting is changed
• Multiple crashes and issues with ripping – Could only backup 1 disc
• Speed is abysmally slow
• Audio out of sync

Expansion

Upon first launch of the application, you are greeted by a well-stylized and decently laid-out design. In the style of a tabbed interface, switching between Convert, Settings and Help is at the click of a tab icon. On the Convert screen is where most of the functionality occurs; On the left is a series of buttons for the different formats available. In the middle is the large preview window with the playback controls, output settings and destination, and to the right is a status information window. The Settings page brings you the ability to customize the settings for the output format, as well as settings for controlling the record functionality which you definitely want to change before you proceed. By default, you have to start the playback of the movie and then quickly click record to start the process; You can change it to start recording from the beginning of the current title (The common playback feature).

There are plenty of playback formats available with this application, including many portable formats as well as AVI, MPEG and FLV. While they are all controlled by drop-down boxes for their settings, overall the setting selections is quite good as well.

During testing however, the application started really showing issues. First off, all movies tried with Macrovision protection would not even start, providing an error stating that the hardware does not support Macrovision, when in fact it does. Going back a bit in my disc collection, I pulled an older movie and this time it started to record. After 5 minutes however, I received an error that there had been an error in the disc that recording could not continue – However, playback could be seen continuing on its own in the background. This also happened on one other older movie. With these, the application would eventually crash after a while after this error occurred. Finally, trying the old tried and true DVD that always works (DVD I recorded and producted), it did finally make it past the point. However, due to the time constraints of the review, the entire rip could not be completed; The recording was stopped at 11 minutes to check the quality of the recording.

The reason the testing had to be stopped was not only that the previous attempts chewed up so much time, it is that the ripping process is so slow; The record speed, with AVI is slower than real-time. Some of the encoding formats appear to be even slower as well. The process of encoding movies could take quite a long time overall. It isn’t very impressive at all.

During my 11-minute test, as with the first 5 minutes of the other two tests, the audio quickly ends up out of phase, no matter if it was AVI or MPEG. The drift continues to get larger as the video progresses, which is not a good sign at all. The video quality appears to be great however, which could still leave some promise for this application.

Final Verdict

While the application does look and feel decent for the most part, the fact that out of 7 discs, I could only back up one I produced myself properly does not bode well. The audio sync issue is also a concern as that by the end of the movie, the audio could be so far out that it would be unbearable. For free, this application just doesn’t cut it for quality or support of actually recording most discs, and does not seem to be a good choice. As for paying $49.95 for this title – The application would have to clean up support functionality and audio sync before it could be contemplated for pay service, and even then the question remains of value.

Posted by BladedThoth on Wednesday, February 20, 2008