I use Freemake or Handbreak depending on what I'm doing both are good Freemake is the easiest to use of the two 

afe66:

 

If the grandparents are in uk then the region coding problem may come up..

 

Handbrake cant rip/encode DVDs with differing region codes from memory.

 

(Ubuntu version doesn't care)

 

If its a one off, get them to send you the DVD then you could rip it and stick it on a blank dvd or USB stick (or stick it on the cloud)

 

 

 

Thanks, but DVD recorded at home probably won't have copy protection. It was recorded somehow by their 5 year old granddaughter, possibly at school or something.

timmmay:

 

FreeMake looks like it has potential...

 

Only use that if you then want to help them cleanup malware afterwards.

stevenz:

 

 

 

Only use that if you then want to help them cleanup malware afterwards.

 

More detail please, what do you know about this? I've already sent them the recommendation to try freemake.

timmmay:

stevenz:Only use that if you then want to help them cleanup malware afterwards.

 

More detail please, what do you know about this? I've already sent them the recommendation to try freemake.

I did say in post #3 to be careful with it.

It installs "OpenCandy" which while not particularly malicious, can be irritating, it also phones-home and does who knows what.

I'm unsure if uninstalling Freemake itself also removes OpenCandy.

It used to install far more invasive malware, so for the fact that it's actually a very good application, this may be a small price to pay.

I use MakeMkv www.makemkv.com. Its currently free during Beta (but its been in Beta for like the last 4-5 odd years). There is a free key in the forums to use (which they update every 3 months) or you can let the registration expire and it still works. 

It will rip anything to an MKV file which you dont need any additional software. Just put the disk in and put ticks in the tracks you want to rip and it does it all. Most players will play the file without any additional codecs etc but I recommend using MPC-HC from  www.mpc-hc.org.

NOTE!
Do note that the rips are uncompressed (meaning that DVD will take up 4GB if its 4GB of data on the disk). Likewise for blurays (ie 20-35GB files). 

I believe Windows Movie Maker used to do DVD -> WMV/MP4 but this is only for Windows 7 (MS removed the DVD decoding from Windows 8 onwards) but I might need someone else to confirm this as its been a while since Ive had Win 7 on my machine. 

I use Any Video converter. It is pretty flexible and works quite well for me. Also easy to set up if you preview the settings first and tell them what to select. Any-Video-converter.com.