How do you rip a clip from a DVD on OS X?

Anders Pollas wants to know about OS X DVD-ripping software. There are several tools out there that will rip an entire DVD to your hard drive, either compressed or uncompressed, but none of these tools make grabbing a specific clip from a film easy, which is what Anders needs. He says, "Im looking for some way of grabbing a specific 3-minute part of a DVD, drag it into iMovie (or something along those lines) for trimming the bits, do a decent fade or whatever."

I covered How to copy your DVDs / CDs in three parts (one, two, and three) a while back. However, since the interest is in grabbing only a specific part of a film, I'd use DVDBackup. This program will make an uncompressed copy of your DVD on your hard drive in a VIDEO_TS folder. After all the different .VOB files have been pulled onto your computer, you just need to figure out which one of those files contains the clip you want to view. If Quicktime is giving you any trouble opening the .VOB files, try using VLC. Open each file up in sequence and see if it is near where your clip appears in the DVD. Once you think you have the right .VOB file, you'll need to convert it into a file format that will let you edit it and this will be the time consuming part of the process.

Quicktime tends to choke on these files and lose the audio when it converts them, so you'll need to grab something like HandBrake, DVDibbler, or ffmpegX to compress and convert the file. Of course, all of these programs could rip and compress the entire DVD, but compressing and re-encoding an entire DVD is much more time consuming (4-10 hours depending upon your processor) than compressing and re-encoding the individual .VOB file (thus the DVDBackup step above). Then, you'll most likely need Quicktime Pro to edit it nicely and cut out the little 3-minute clip. This method is lots and lots of work and very time consuming.

Does anyone know of a simpler and quicker solution? Let us know in the comments.

Update: Make sure you check the comments on this one. Lots of great tips. Our readers rock!