What is ripping?

The word "rip" is a verb which means to tear or move precipitously or violently. Other than the meaning in the real world, rip has a much different meaning when it is related to digital media. In its derivation, ripping is to copy the video or audio files on discs to a hard drive. However, ripping is obviously different from copying, or why don't people use the word copy directly. As a matter of fact, ripping is in terms of files that are not able to be directly copied from a disc. For example, CD, VCD and DVD files are all possessed with copy protection systems. Ripping from a DVD is always used to describe the process of avoiding copy protection systems to copy the encrypted content. As a result, ripping is also used in describing the whole process of decoding DVD, and then converts the audio and video into a smaller format.

A more formal phrase that used to refer the ripping of video and audio files is digital extraction. The very word "extract" suggests the exact meaning of this phrase. The system of CD, DVD and such discs is designed to provide audios and videos so that it ensures continuous playing without gaps. Therefore, the discs do not provide a stream of data from the disc to the computer and is not for ease of use in a computer file system. For this reason, concerning to such digital files, ripping is often used to convert formats, to edit, and to make duplications or backups of the media files.

In recent years, more and more companies offering service related to ripping have entered into the market. They correctly sense the great popularity of audio and video industry and seize the opportunity to dig the immense commercial potential in it. Among which, DVD Rip takes an important role in this development.