If you have ever burnt a DVD to disc and deleted your original Quicktime or DV files you will appreciate the power of a tool that will allow you to rip the movie back from the DVD to allow for web sharing or further editing.

Handbrake is an Open Source program which means that a collaborative approach has been taken by the computing community to develop it. Think of the community as volunteer programmers working to provide tools in return for donations.

As such Handbrake can be downloaded and used for free.

The program is easy to use.
It should be noted of course that, as ever, video takes a mammoth amount of disk space so check that you have enough space before you start ripping a DVD.

Handbrake can rip the contents of almost any DVD film, though consideration should be given to copyright laws relating to the material.