Drive-in: Give Your DVD Drive a Rest

I remember that moment after I got my first iPod when it suddenly dawned on me that I didn’t have to lug around a huge binder full of CDs in my car anymore. Since that time, every time I buy a CD, it gets ripped to my computer and then put away. That kind of revolution is what made the iPod what it is today, and many people have tried to take that concept and apply it to DVD movies as well. Flip4Mac, the creators of the Windows Media codec for QuickTime, have created the application Drive-in to attempt just that.

Drive-in has a very simple core concept that is a bit different from the DVD ripper/encoder apps like HandBrake and MacTheRipper. Instead of extracting just the movie in a compressed video format, Drive-in actually makes a one-to-one copy of the disc. It then allows you to mount the image file it creates to play it in DVD Player, and your computer is none the wiser. The advantage, of course, is that once you copy the disc to your hard drive, your DVD drive doesn’t have to do the work to play the movie, saving tons of battery life.

Drive-in stores the disc images as .dvdimage files inside its own special wrapper that it calls a “case.” The interesting part about this is that the case stores all of the information about the disc from Amazon, including DVD cover image, synopsis, review, and cast information. Each case can also hold multiple image files, so if your movie includes special features on a separate disc, you can store them all in one single file.

One big advantage to using Drive-in for watching movies on the go is that you can copy an entire DVD to your drive in about 10–15 minutes, as opposed to an hour or more with a ripping/encoding option. There are a couple of disadvantages, though. First, as the image file is a bit-for-bit copy, it’s just as large as the original DVD, often several gigabytes, and includes the same copy protection that the disc itself did. Second, you can’t play or open the image files with anything else other than Drive-in, so once you use it, you’re somewhat stuck.

Overall, if you want a complete, full-quality copy of a DVD disc for archival purposes or to watch while traveling to save battery life, Drive-in is not a bad option. If you just want the movie itself and you don’t mind going to extra mile to rip and encode it to a compressed format, there are better options out there for archiving DVDs. (We like HandBrake.)

Flip4Mac Drive-in is currently in a public beta, and is free during that period. You can find it here.