Before anyone gets flustered–I am the legal owner of the DVD’s I’d like to rip–I bought them and currently own them.
If I use Handbrake to rip DVD’s onto my MacBookPro’s hard drive for later loading to an iPod Touch, should I keep the aspect ratio/picture settings at “Normal” or switch to one of the iPod-specific high-rez/low-rez presets? Ideally, I’d like to be able to watch the videos either on my laptop or on the iPod depending on which I have with me but if using “Normal” will foul up the iPod, I’ll just have to go back and re-do the couple of videos I’ve already encoded.
I don’t know the answer to this. I however ripped them twice for the ones I wanted to watch on a computer. Once with an iPhone/Touch setting and once with a higher quality setting. My goal was to reduce the size they took on my iPhone.
Most of my DVD ripping is actually still in DVD format – I am not trying to save space but make a backup of my DVDs that the kids can use without scratching them up…
Hmmm–I’m not super concerned re: file size since once I get a 64 GB iPod Touch (waiting for one to show up in Apple’s Refurb. Store), that’ll be quite a bit of space for my ~25 gigs of music, a bunch o’ apps, and some movies. Most likely I’d load the movies for when I’m traveling and don’t want to tote along the laptop and them pull them off the iPod once I’m home so they wouldn’t be taking up gig upon gig of space all the time.
I would rip 2 copies, one for the iPod format and then a higher quality for your laptop. You could always see if the higher quality one will play on iPod but of course you will be using up a lot more space than necessary.
But… I didn’t think handbrake could take off the copyprotection on “protected” DVDs??
I’ve only done one protected DVD (the rest I do from my already ripped version I keep on computer for the kids to use) but it worked fine. That was about 2 years ago so the current handbrake version may be different??
Go buy RipIt to use in conjunction with Handbrake. You can download it from Versiontracker at no cost. It will work for 7 days so you can try it out. After that send them the $15.00 because it is worth it.
Ripit allows you to rip the entire DVD that you own. It saves the file as a Mac Movie Player file. When you open it it is exactly like having your DVD in the machine, all the chapters, languages, scene selections, and extras. It looks and acts just like the disk. The advantages are numerous, but the most important things are you don’t have to keep the DVD with you all the time, and also if you are running on battery power it takes less power to run the movie from your hard disk and from RAM than it does to run the DVD from the DVD drive. You’ll save wear and tear on the drive and get longer battery life which is important on long flights for instance. (If you put movies on a thumb drive you’ll get even better battery performance than running it from the hard drive!)
You launch RipIt, put the DVD into the drive and push 1 button, and it will copy the entire DVD in about 25 to 45 minutes, depending on the size of the movie and your computers horsepower. The advantage is that you can then use Handbrake at any time later on to make lower resolution versions for your computer, iPad, iPhone, iPod, Apple TV, or whatever device you wish. If you get to that point I can give you some numbers to try out, but the presets built into Handbrake are a pretty good starting point. Good luck.
Have you tried using those ripped DVD’s on an iPod Touch on only on a machine running OSX?
On Edit: SOB–I just bought RipIt before seeing it only works on OSX 10.5 and up–I’m still running 10.4 so mebbe this is my excuse to finally upgrade…
On 2nd Edit: With my education discount (I’m taking an online class this semester), OSX.6 was only $33/delivered so that upgrade cost isn’t a big deal at all and I should have the disc sometime in the beginning of next week. :D:D:D
Geez, all I did was point out that it is a violation of the DMCA to remove copy protection from a protected disc and that M4C tends to avoid discussions that involve circumventing laws.
Beyond that, I say rip away. Rip a copy for the laptop and one for the iPod. You will like the higher quality on the laptop and for outputting to TVs. The trade-off is the bigger file sizes (I like to get mine down to about a gig), but on the laptop it shouldn’t be a problem. Then rip again for the iPod, to keep the file sizes smaller and to keep your iTunes library from growing to huge sizes. If you’ve removed the copy protection and have the HD space, you might want to go ahead and save the full DVD should you need to burn it in the future.
If you want to make it easy, use the iPod Touch output setting for your iPod, and the AppleTV setting for your laptop. Use the preview window to see what it’s going to look like (the aspect ratio you want, etc.) before you rip it.
