I hope the GOTD mods are off doing something worthwhile for themselves this evening, & so I thought I'd post a couple of answers/comments regarding the Tipard DVD Ripper in case it helps anyone at all.
I think today's ripper is a decent app. It does look like many others on the surface. I think the basic methods of coding these video converters/rippers, plus a lot of code itself, is available to many different developers, just like the open source ffmpeg & QT code. Individual coders add their own touches. If the forums & such where that stuff circulates were in English or German I suspect we'd see more of them. Also, when I've searched for some gadget or whatever I bought from a China or Hong Kong based site, &/or when I'm searching for drivers for some of that stuff, I invariably wind up at one of the export sites listing countless manufacturers, all producing what appears to be the same thing. If that's the way things work in that part of the world for physical products, I assume software works much the same way. At any rate & in a nutshell, I don't think it's necessarily bad to have an app based on something widely used, because that also tends to mean widely proven. I also like newer versions &/or newer apps using newer versions of ffmpeg, which is under continual development itself -- the Tipard app surprised me with it's speed, though I don't know if that's because the devs did a great job or ffmpeg is improving.
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"Can it rip a European made DVD to an American format so it can play on an American home DVD player?
If so, what “profile” do I select?
Generally, what “profile” to select for making a regular DVD that will play on a home DVD player?"
If your DVD player does DivX [most do I think], the easiest way to accomplish what you want is convert it to DivX/Xvid using encoding settings your DVD player will handle -- more advanced settings/features are more often supported on higher dollar players, but you'll have to research what you've got. It might take a bit of testing with different cropping, re-sizing, & encoder (profile) settings, but I'd think you could get something to work fairly easily.
For actual DVDs it's complicated (though less so than going US to EU). There is software to do it for you, but quality of results varies widely. What you're dealing with is PAL spec video, which is 25 fps & 720 x 576 -- if it's wide screen video then it's anamorphic, meaning it won't display at that 720 x 576, but something wider... you'll probably want to do a bit of both re-sizing & cropping to get to NTSC 720 x 480, shown ~873 X 480 wide screen [believe it or not there's not an actual wide screen spec]. Bear in mind there's another 2 wrinkles or gotchas -- NTSC black is different, though you might get away ignoring that, & 720 x 480 on your TV looks like 655 x 480 on your PC... that 2nd is mainly a bother because the display on your PC might look stretched out while you're working with it [DVD player software shows DVD video taller than it actually is to compensate]. You'll also have to account for frame rate. It can get a bit iffy depending on the original source & how it was put into PAL -- you might have film at 24 fps, altered to play at PAL 25, or you might really have 25 fps. You'd want to get it to 24 fps, possibly only changing the video file headers, then the best route is to apply pulldown [which is embedded instructions for the player to repeat certain frames to achieve 29.976 fps], either while encoding to mpg2 or afterwards. At that point it's a matter of importing that into DVD authoring software. If you want to do menus & such, you'll have to convert that video as well, then more-or-less re-create the original DVD, as none of the original buttons or highlights [or probably subs] will match up. Audio, probably converted from AC3 to wav, will likely need it's length or duration adjusted as well if you wound up just playing 25 fps at 24, then it would be re-encoded to AC3.
"The converting time is of average speed and will take almost the same time as if you were watching the DVD."
Actually it was only slow for me when the AMD/ATI hardware acceleration was enabled [the default]. With that disabled it was as fast as anything I've seen converting DVD to AVC/H264, which I think is the most processing intensive or difficult.
"In a “normal” converter (as in the Tippard MOD Converter, Format Factory and many others) you have to convert each VOB file separately and then edit them all together to create 1 file. A DVD ripper does all that at once, so your end product is 1 large continuous file. Also this allows you to do editing of the movie as well."
There are at least 2 ways to handle this in a video converter that doesn't accept DVDs as input. One way is to use DVD Shrink to *copy* the DVD video from one folder to another -- in the options dialog uncheck split VOB files, & make sure DVD Shrink shows 100% so you know you're not shrinking anything. Optionally you can also trim the length, &/or select just the audio & subs you want. That gives you one VOB file you can import into whatever without bothering to import several & merge, & takes just as long as it takes to copy the DVD content from one place to another -- probably just a few minutes depending on the speed of your PC/laptop.
A 2nd method is to use some free apps: dgmpgdec, Avisynth, & sometimes VFAPI... Dgmpgdec includes an app called DGIndex that in a few minutes creates an index file for the set of VOB files you imported. Avisynth takes [usually simple] scripts in a text file labeled *.avs and more-or-less connects your media with another application -- DGIndex can create the .avs file for you, & includes directions to write your own in it's help file [just 2 simple lines]. Many apps will accept *.avs files as-is, including the free VirtualDub editing app that'll let you resize & much more. In 32 bit Windows you can also use VFAPI to create a fake avi file from either your DGIndex .d2v file or an .avs file -- it works in 64 bit Windows but is a real pain to setup/install. The receiving app uses the VFAPI avi file normally, but it's actually accessing the DVD's mpg2 through a sort of software chain that is called frame-serving. The advantage of frame-serving is usually higher quality -- open a DVD mpg2 file & the software often decodes & interprets it into its own internal colorspace, then converts it again into your output codec... an app like VirtualDub OTOH can do the same thing without that 1st conversion, often keeping everything in the original mpg2 colorspace as long and/or as much as possible. You can also use Avisynth or VirtualDub to do some *very* high quality re-sizing... test 1st, because there's 2 ways this can work -- with several options to choose from either app can often do better re-sizing than most convertors, but some encoders can handle the re-size themselves, & they *might* do better given the max amount of data, i.e. the full-size frame [which is better depends on the encoder used & its settings]. What to look for: when down-sizing [e.g. for a hand-held &/or cell], methods that are too sharp tend to produce a shimmering effect, worse on horizontal edges, & sometimes a moire pattern, often noticeable on something like men's suit coats. Maybe counter-intuitively, more sharpness isn't always better.
