DVD ripping (the conversion of films from DVD format into another format) is a popular topic, but it's bit of a grey area. Lawyers for film companies will tell you that it's copyright theft, plain and simple, but common sense says that if you own a DVD of a film, converting that film into another format for your own personal use shouldn't be a problem; the alternative is to buy another copy of the same film in a different format, and that just seems greedy on the part of the film studios. Home conversion or copying only becomes a real problem if you give copies to other people; at that point it's piracy.

The law may or may not agree with our view, depending on where in the world you happen to live, so with this in mind you should use DVD ripping software at your own risk. And the chances are that if you are going to use such software, you'll use it for converting your movies into a format that can be viewed using a portable multimedia player, such as Sony's PlayStation Portable, Apple's iPod or any of a number of similar products (we've reviewed plenty of them; you can read the reviews here).

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ImTOO DVD Ripper Platinum does that and more. It's one of the fastest and easiest to use ripping utilities we've seen to date. It's claimed to be (we quote), "powerful and 300 percent super faster", although we're not sure what it's super faster than.

It does seem pretty nippy, though. Converting a full-length movie to a good quality DivX copy took about 80 percent of the movie playing time, so if you have a movie that's 100 minutes long, it should take about 80 minutes to rip to DivX, at least on PCs like our Core 2 Duo test system. Other formats may be faster or slower, depending on their quality, compression ratio, resolution and so on.

It's also easy to use, at least at its most basic level. Insert your DVD or choose your source video files, tick the chapter boxes, choose the output format and hit the 'record' button. Supported output formats include PSP, iPod, AVI, MPEG, WMV, DivX, RM, MOV, MP4, MPEG4 and 3GP, all neatly arranged in a drop-down list. You can choose to rip all or part of a DVD, choose which audio track and subtitle language to use, change resolution and quality, and so on. Also supplied is a utility for transferring files to your PSP, should you have one.

The software doesn't seem to particularly care about copy protection, either: we ripped one DVD with a 'Copy Protected' logo on the case, and DVD Ripper Platinum didn't even blink.

There are some negative points to contend with, though. If you stray outside the program's main screen, you're in for some confusion. There are various options for tweaking and adjusting the ripping process, the output format and so on. While experienced rippers will doubtless know what's going on here, the majority of new users will not.

That wouldn't be a problem if the help system explained everything, but it doesn't. In fact all it does is link to an online FAQ that gives some basic instructions and states that the standard settings should suffice in most circumstances. We're glad to hear it, but it would still be nice to have the various settings and options explained in more detail, so we can decide for ourselves.

If you have any doubts about whether this ripping software is for you, you can download a trial version first to see if you like it.

This is a powerful piece of software for converting DVD movies into other formats. If you want to watch your favourite movies on a small screen while you're out and about - travelling by train or 'plane, for example - then you're unlikely to find an easier way of converting them than this. Some more comprehensive help text would be welcome, though.