Digital Home Thoughts: SlySoft Moving AnyDVD Away From Free Lifetime Upgrades Starting January 1st, 2009

If you've ever needed to rip a commercial DVD, whether for transcoding to a portable device or for extracting scenes, there's nothing on the market that makes it easier to do than AnyDVD from Slysoft [Affiliate]. I'm a cheerleader for this product because it works so incredibly well - in fact, it works invisibly, requiring no steps of any sort to use beyond installing. My review of AnyDVD is found here, but the important part is that nothing truly great lasts forever: and that includes the lifetime upgrades from Slysoft. Buying a program once and having it be updated week after week, year after year, is practically unheard of - even WinZip stopped doing that a couple of years ago. Slysoft has offered free lifetime upgrades for years on AnyDVD, but starting on January 1st, all versions of AnyDVD sold will have a yearly subscription fee. It makes sense when you think about it, because the guys at Slysoft are constantly updating the program to defeat new copyright protection schemes, and without subscription income who knows how long that could last.

So here's the deal: right now Slysoft is offering 20% discounts on all their products, taking AnyDVD from 49 Euros down to 38.62 Euros (about $56 USD). If you purchase the software before before January 1st, you'll get the free lifetime upgrades. If you want to add on the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD decryption option, again offered with the lifetime upgrades, it's another $34 USD or so. Yes, that makes for a somewhat expensive bundle, but I can't reccomend this product highly enough - it truly works wonders in a way that nothing else on the market can.