ZC DVD Ripper Platinum

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on April 19, 2013

We've tried many freeware DVD rippers and converters, but so far, few have stood out. When we saw that the latest release of ZC DVD Ripper Platinum was listed as freeware, we were intrigued: Perhaps it's a premium tool that's now free? Or maybe a free trial version of shareware? Unfortunately, we were never able to clear that up with ZC DVD Ripper Platinum. Worse, we couldn't even use it.

The latest release of ZC DVD Ripper Platinum, version 3, is listed as ready for Windows 8 and includes "major" bug fixes. It requires at least 256MB of RAM (we had 8GB) and DirectX 9 or better (we had DirectX 11) to run. We installed it in a system running Windows 7 Home Premium SP1. A nag screen suggested we needed to buy a license to use the software (Hmmm, we thought this was freeware?). ZC DVD Ripper Platinum's interface is really nothing more than a media player with a drop-down menu of output choices, a Settings icon, and a Record button. The Settings are minimal, mostly specifying codecs and output options. We could set the program for stereo or mono but not multichannel formats. But ZC DVD Ripper Platinum offers a lot of options for copying and converting DVDs under Output Format. We were mostly interested in backing up our DVDs to disk to play in a home theater system, so we made our selections and pressed Record. Unfortunately, ZC DVD Ripper Platinum froze and crashed -- three times.

There's no Help file or similar resources with ZC DVD Ripper Platinum to consult, and the developer's Web site was less help since it made no reference to the Platinum version being free; only ZC DVD Audio Ripper is listed as free software on the Products page, leaving us more confused about this program. Perhaps we would have been able to tell which version was which, had we been able to run the software and see what, exactly, it does. But after three attempts and three frozen program screens, we decided ZC DVD Ripper Platinum wasn't worth the time.

Publisher's Description

From ZC Software:

1. DVD Recorder: Record DVD main movie video and audio and encode to avi, divx, xvid, wmv, mp4, mpeg, wma, mp3, wav-50 kinds of popular key video and audio formats.
2. DVD Title Ripper: Convert dvd to iPod, iPhone, Mobille phone, Pocket PC, PSP, Zune, and the other popular video formats.
3. DVD Audio Ripper: Rip dvd audio track to be mp3, m4a, ac3, mp2, wma, aac, amr, sun au, wav ect audio formats file.
ZC DVD Ripper Platinum is a super DVD backup and convert tool software, which is a DVD Player firstly, and it can not only record any DVDs' audio and video you can playback on your computer, but also can rip the DVDs' titles to be 50 kinds of popular audio and video key formats, which are playable on portable media device(iPod, iPhone, Mobile phone, Pocket PC, Sony PSP, Microsoft Zune, Apple TV), such as avi, divx, xvid, mpeg, wmv, wma, mp3, wav. The intuitionistic design make it be so easy to use without any computer or multimedia audio and video knowledge base requirement.

Key Features:

1) Up to 7x ripping speed.
2) DVD Player playbak and watch DVDs.
3) DVD Recorder record DVDs' video and audio.
4) Record what you watch through out the DVD main movie.
5) DVD title Ripper convert DVDs' titles.
6) DVD title Ripper extract DVD titles' audio track.
7) 1-click output format and quality profile settings.
8) Select main title automatically.
9) Convert dvd to most of popular video formats.
10) Convert dvd to portable media device playable video and music.
11) Record dvd audio track to tens of music format.
12) DVD titles and chapters batch conversion.
13) DVD title rename to change the output file name.
14) Edit DVD ripping start and end range.
15) Subtitle color and transparent changeable.
16) Crop video to be comfortable aspect ratio.
17) Remove video black bar.
18) Video scene camera grab image when playback movie.
19) DVD angle selectable.
20) Customize duration splitter.
21) Built-in Sony PSP movie manager.
22) Support portable device: iPod, iPhone, Mobile Phone, Microsoft Zune, Apple TV, iTouch, Pocket PC, Sony PSP ect.
23) Keep original aspect ratio.
24)DVD playback preview.
25) Shutdown computer automatically when job is done.