Sunday, December 17, 2006

Copying DVD's

My son added a program to my iMac that would rip a DVD so that he could
play it on his iPod. I was playing with it the other day and realized
that it can also rip DVD's and make .avi files from them. Since both our
DVD players will also play .avi files I decided to test it out. One of
the features is a choice of methods to constrain the size (and
ultimately the quality). One of those choices was to keep the final file
to a certain size, it defaults to 700 mb (CD size). So I chose that
option, popped in one of my son's DVD's that I hadn't watched, and
waited. The movie was 1:33 and it took roughly 4.5 hours to re-encode
the film as an .avi. I popped it in the DVD player and am happy to
report that it works just fine on a 25" set. So I popped it in the other
player connected to a 36" set, and there I can detect, when looking
extremely closely, some minute artifacting. My suspicion is that it
might be a little more noticable on some of the really big screens, but
hey! If you can afford a huge plasma screen, you can probably afford to
BUY a backup copy, eh? ;-)

If you're still reading this, I suspect that you're intriqued. The name
of the program is Handbrake and its available for free at:

http://handbrake.m0k.org

Now I realize that I'm among the small percentage of folks that use a
Mac and this information might be of help to most, except that the
creator of Handbrake is creating a version for Windows and its in the
beta version, also available on the same site. There's a link that will
take you to a forum style page that has downloads for the various steps
in his progress. My advice would be to download the latest version (part
way down the page) as the first version has no GUI and I don't know
anyone that prefers command line interfaces (although, no doubt, there
are some!). Checking the responses I see that most folks are having good
luck with the beta.

If you Windows users choose to test the program, please let us know!

check out my latest podcasts at:
KomicsKast.libsyn.com and
Comicspodcastcrossover.libsyn.com

1 Comments:

Blogger kafraco said...

Sometimes things are easier and quicker to do from a command prompt. If I have just one file to upload to my server, it's a lot easier to go to the command prompt and type 'ftp' than it is to start the GUI. However, if I have an entire directory structure to upload, the GUI is the way to go.

1:01 PM  

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