GadgetGeek – Release Your DVDs to the Mobile World
Wednesday, January 7th, 2009
Ever wanted to watch your favorite movie or TV show on the move? One excellent piece of software allows you to achieve this effortlessly and best of all its free!
Handbrake is a free open-source video conversion tool available for Windows, MacOS X and Linux. I stumbled onto this piece of software only a few months ago and I have found it excellent at producing first rate compact versions of some of my DVDs.
It is specifically designed to create MPEG-4 versions on DVDs, but will also complete conversions between a limited set of video codecs (e.g. MPEG to AVI).
Using Handbrake couldn’t be simpler. Just insert your DVD and from the Handbrake main screen select the VIDEO_TS folder of the DVD and Handbrake will scan for content and provide a list. The normal tricky part of trying to figure out what video and audio codec your device needs has been made easy by having a varied selection of devices to pick from. Selecting your device automatically sets up Handbrake for the optimum quality of video and audio for the output file. Hitting ‘Start’ kicks of the encoding and will dump the file to the place of your choice.
I’ve so far tried this on my iPod Touch and PSP and found that a 2 hour movie ends up around 1GB when encoded for my Touch. With 32GB to play with I’ve stuck several movies onto my iPod and have found them all very clear and easy to watch while sat on the train. I also have many more sat on my Mac and they still look pretty good on the full screen. Having a whole selection of films and TV shows on my Mac is great for traveling and also cuts down on battery consumption as there is no DVD drive to power.
Some of the devices included in the automatic settings include Apple TV, Xbox 360 and PS3, so you can also load these up for watching on your TV.
Buy an 8GB USB stick, load it up with 16 hrs of all your favorite movies and TV shows and you can watch them whenever you have access to a computer, PS3 or Xbox 360.
Please remember, using this software is for personal use only and not for selling on copies of all your DVDs!
Find the software here.
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I’ve been looking for a good program to rip dvds for awhile. Thanks!
what is a good program to rip a DVD of – lets say season 1 of buffy, disc 1 – into 4 different files of each one being a single episode of buffy?
I would assume that this software could do that as each episode is probably a separate video file on the DVD anyway.
Handbrake will do this. Each episode will appear as a (approx) 42 minute video file that you select. In fact you can queue all 4 and leave handbrake to encode each into seprate files. If you click on the second screen shot above you will see that I actually have Buffy Season 4 DVD in as an example.
Thanks.
Is anyone else having an issue with this? It keeps skipping and freezing a movie, and won’t make anything beyond about 30minutes…
am i just doing it wrong?
(making it into an iPhone compatible format)