Plays Well With Others

iTunes and the Movies…

Apple 30 GB iPod video Black (5.5 Generation)

For those of us that use iTunes to manage our music libraries, we know how wonderful it is to be able to dump the shelves full of music CD’s and have them all ripped to a small harddrive sitting next to the computer. Most of my music comes from CD’s I previously owned, with a small handful coming from the iTunes store directly. And if someone buys me a CD, it immediately gets uploaded to my iTunes.

The nice thing about iTunes is that I can share it between computers, making it a portable music source whenever I’m sitting at a computer. My hard drive sits at home, and I can listen to my music on my home computer, my laptop or even my work computer. It’s great. Using an Airport Express, I can wirelessly transmit the music to my home stereo and play it like I used to play CDs.

With Apple’s recent announcement of the Apple TV, it brings ALL of my multimedia into my living room. Not only can I listen to my music on my television set, but also show my photos and my downloaded movies. It beats huddling around a computer monitor to try and watch a movie or show your family your newest photos.

And this got me to wondering that if I can import my music into iTunes, why couldn’t I do the same with the DVD’s I own. And after a little research I found that I can.

There’s a free utility called Handbrake that allows ripping of DVD’s into a format that can then be imported into iTunes. These movies can then be watched on your TV or your iPod. Quite nice if your stuck in an airport and don’t have one of those little mini-DVD players, but do have a video iPod.

Instructions for using handbrake are quite easy:

1. Download and install HandBrake
2. Insert the DVD you wish to convert into your Mac’s DVD drive
3. If your Mac’s DVD Player application opens, exit the DVD Player application
4. Open the HandBrake application
5. Select Detected volume and click on Open
6. Wait as HandBrake detects the titles on your DVD
7. To convert the DVD for viewing on a Mac:
   Leave the default settings or choose the settings you wish. For best quality, select Video: 2-pass encoding
8. To convert the DVD for viewing on a video-enabled iPod:
   Select the following settings:
    * Destination – File format: MP4 file
    * Destination – Codecs: AVC/H.264 Video / AAC Audio
    * Video – Encoder: x264 (Baseline profile)
    * Video – Quality: Average bitrate (kbps): 400
    * Select 2-pass encoding
    * Audio – Sample rate (Hz): 44100
    * Bitrate (kbps): 128
    * Click on Picture settings… button to open edit window and set size to:
     Width: 320
     Height: 240 (or less if aspect ratio is not 3:2)
     Keep Aspect ratio checked
9. Click on Rip
10. When the progress bar indicates Done exit HandBrake

Once this .mp4 file is created, simply open iTunes and drop the file into your library.

Last night I did a test DVD to see what would happen. At first it said it was going to take 5 days to rip the DVD, but I left it on overnight and it ended up taking about 8 hours. I’m sure the speed is all dependent on how fast your computer equipment is.

I can already see that I’ll need to buy a larger hard drive if I go this route, but it’s nice to know that it can be done.

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