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A friend of mine likes ripping DVDs to his Mac. He’s currently on an ancient machine, and is about to upgrade to either a MacBook Pro or an iMac.

Just wondering if any of the Mac DVD ripping software will rip faster on the iMac (thanks to its four cores), as opposed to the MacBook Pro (a measly two cores)? Or is DVD ripping not that sort of task?

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Nope. Basically, it's not that sort of task. For ripping, the bottleneck is the speed of the DVD drive, and the main CPU usage is directing the data traffic from the DVD drive to the hard drive.

The multiple cores will help if you try to encode the rip later.

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Aha, gotcha, nice one. I think he’s looking to convert a lot of the video to work on his iPhone, so he’ll probably be doing a lot of encoding too. Excellent, cheers. – Paul D. Waite Oct 26 '09 at 15:11
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I think the following link indicates that Handbrake takes advantage of multiple cores:

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right, but that's for the encoding. – quack quixote Oct 26 '09 at 15:19
handbrake will rip and encode. The encoding (which based on OPs comment he also needs to do) multi-threads quite nicely – skarface Jan 27 '10 at 22:13
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