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I have many DVDs. Not as many as most of my single friends have, but certainly more than I'll ever watch. I guess that's a necessary sacrifice when you have kids; you find yourself watching fewer Hong Kong cinema action movies and more...well, SpongeBob. Thankfully, SpongeBob's actually pretty funny. And truth be known, my nearly-four-year-old daughter is developing a pretty good taste in movies. She tends to bypass all the Barbie Princess and baby dinosaur stuff on her way to Jim Henson's Labyrinth and the Beatles' Yellow Submarine. Works for me.
Seems I have more time for watching movies when I'm not actually near my DVD player, so, what to do? Get some honest use out of my iPod classic and iPhone, that's what to do. Trouble is, I don't use iTunes for buying movies. I want the extras, I want the 5.1 surround sound. I want the relative lack of compression, and, yes, I want the DVD sitting comfortably in my collection. Converting store-bought DVDs to the iPod isn't as convenient as purchasing the movie straight from the iTunes store, but it's also something that should intimidate you at all. It's mostly pretty easy, and even better, it's free with HandBrake.
HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter available for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. It's actively supported, and it has a great user community. HandBrake works with any DVD-like source (VIDEO_TS folder, DVD image or real DVD (encrypted or unencrypted, but protection methods other than CSS are not supported and must be handled externally with third-party software), and some .VOB and .TS files). If your DVD is copy-protected in a format not compatible with HandBrake, a program such as MacTheRipper may be used to generate files that HandBrake can read. Details on this process are covered in our article on using your Mac to convert DVD regions, and a more concise article will soon be posted here. Otherwise, read on to see how easy HandBrake is to use.
Once you've downloaded and installed HandBrake, put a DVD in your Macintosh. Chances are, DVD Player will automatically start. Shut it down, but leave the DVD in your system. Then, launch HandBrake. After being presented with a window that'll allow you to select your DVD (and chose the DVD itself...no reason to dig deeper into the folder hierarchy), you'll see this screen:
It looks like a lot, but don't be intimidated. Chances are, you know what all of this means. In the Source area, you see Title and Chapters. For a full movie, you'll want to leave this alone. In my case, though, I'm simply pulling a video off of Queen Greatest Hits Volume 1. The song I want is "Save Me," which is track eight on the DVD, so I'm selecting only chapter eight.
Oh, notice the Preset drawer off to the right? HandBrake is kind enough to provide presets for AppleTV, the iPod, QuickTime, and more. You can also create and save your own presets, which can be very handy (aside from the obvious YouTube connection, I've used HandBrake numerous times for clients who want to get their marketing DVD videos on their website, and the ability to save presets for them is a huge time-saver). For this instance, though, I'm selecting iPod High-Rez and letting HandBrake take care of all the settings.
As you can see, HandBrake automatically adjusted the output format, the video/audio codecs, the encoder, the bitrate, and more. You can feel free to change any of this, of course. In fact, if you know what you're doing or are an adventurous sort, you can click on the Advanced tab and tweak the settings all you want.
Have fun. Me? I'll leave that to the experts.
Now, once you've got all your settings chosen, you can either add this conversion to the queue and set up another video (for instance, if I were to be pulling two videos from the DVD), or you can start ripping the video. Since I'm only pulling one video, I'll start ripping. Oh, but first, you're not stuck with HandBrake's suggested file destination. I'm going to be dumping my video straight to the desktop so it's easier to find when it's done.
And so, start. Now, depending upon your computer, this can take a very, very long time if you're grabbing an entire movie. With my settings above, the Queen song took just under five minutes, and this is on a 2GHz Intel Core Duo iMac. If you're ripping a two hour movie on a slower PowerPC, and if you're using 2-Pass Encoding...take a nap. Play some football. Have a cocktail, as HandBrake suggests. You're going to be waiting for a while.
Once it's done, adding the video to iTunes is a simple matter of drag and drop. Open iTunes, and drag the video into your library. It'll appear under the Movies category in your library, so click on it once and either hit Command+I on your keyboard or select Get Info from the file menu. You can add any details you want to the Info tab, but then move on to the Video tab where you can mark this as a music video. This will place the video with your music, not your movies or TV shows, if you prefer. This is what I do, but I then click on the Sorting tab to keep all of my videos together in the Library. Otherwise, each video will be mixed in with the music you have of that artist. My method is to sort by artist (Various, to keep all of the videos together), and then by album (in this case, Animated Videos, which are my favorite music videos that feature animation).
When this is done, you simply drag the video/movie from your Library to your iPod or iPhone, then have at it.
So, that's all there is to it. It may seem like a lot, but HandBrake does most of the thinking for you. With a few simple steps and quite a bit of encoding time, you can easily get your favorite movies on your iPod, and at least a couple of them on your iPhone for private viewing wherever you may be. With this kind accessibility, I may just be able to get back into Hong Kong cinema. What have I missed since The Naked Killer?
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First of all your article on HandBrake was very helpful. But when i downloaded handbrake there was 2 options for my server( which is windows) and i chose the first option. I think it was called GUF, or GIF or something. Anyways handbrake downloaded fine and i even succsessfully downloaded a movie. The problem is when i put it on my iPod it was only 5 min long, second there was no picture and the sound was cutting out every second (it sounded like TV satalite when there is a storm, like pixely) I have a feeling I downloaded the wrong version of handbrake for windows. Can you please tell me what i did wrong and how to successfully download a whole movie with audio and video, i’d really, really appreciate it. Thanks