I set out to rip a DVD 9 (?) of a popular comic book turned movie with new style DRM that made the disc appear to be 50GB or so. MTR 3 crashed, Fairmount claimed it couldn't find VLC (v0.9.10 is in /Applications), and HandBrake claimed that libdvdcss was not installed when I know that it is, and scanning 'without' it resulted in a crash so I decided to try MacX Ripper Pro.
First of all, the interface. The screenshot above is outdated, the new UI looks nothing like that. The interface is pretty simplistic, you have preset options (VIDEO TS H264, VIDEO TS MPEG4, MOV H264, MOV MPEG4, MP4 H264, MP4 MPEG4, DIVX/XVID AVI, etc…) for different devices - including Windows compatible presets. Each preset has a quality slider and that's the extent of your options in that window.
Make sure you have what you want on the first window, because there's no way to go back to it. The second window gives you a choice of "titles" to rip and recommends the correct one. From here you can add subtitles, and apparently for TS only you get some more detailed options - frame rate, bit rate, resolution. The list of all the "titles" has a edit button for each one where you can preview, add subtitles, trim the beginning and/or end, and crop & expand.
The final window offers "Use High Quality Engine" but there's no explanation what exactly it does, deinterlacing, "Safe Mode" again with no explanation, and you can select how many cores to use. You can also select the destination on this page too.
What does all this boil down to? Using MP4/H264 set to highest quality, the first thing I noticed was that the progress bar went to 100% in about 20 minutes even though it was still an hour or two from being done. What It produced in the end was a 2.1GB file with fair to good picture at 1920x1200. It starts with an extra and then plays it 2 or 3 more times for good measure. Up next is an advertisement that plays repeatedly for good measure. I'm 1:09:33 into the video and the opening credits have just started.
It did better than MTR3, Fairmount, or HandBrake but the results are not exactly impressive. Definitely not $40 impressive.