I’ve been using Handbrake in the past to re-encode my backed up DVDs for viewing on my iPod. It worked, but there was a couple steps involved, and there was a butt-load of settings to jack around with. So they did it one better… they came out with Instant Handbrake
This is so simple. You just drop in your disc, select it in the pull down, select your destination type and your done… Here is the quick overview…
Fire up Instant Handbrake…
Drop in a disc, and it will automatically be displayed in the Pull Down menu.
Hit Continue and you’ll be able to see all the Titles available on your disc. And select which ones you with to encode. Mine was season two of MASH… I love MASH. Hawkeye cracks me up. Yeah, I know, think what you will.
Now Select File format. You can choose iPod (H.264), iPod (mp4), or PSP… I don’t have a PSP, so I didn’t compare this, however I did compare the two iPod formats.
Notice that the H.264 is almost half the size of the mpeg-4 compression. However… we need to also make a choice on where are you going to be watching the video? Strictly on the iPod’s screen, or out to a standard def TV (which I do a lot in hotel rooms) The Default size of these are differnt while the H.264 was encoded at 320×240, the Mpeg-4 was encoded at 544×416. Why? I don’t know. However, this size would a little better on a TV.
Encoding was relativly fast… One Mash Episode took about 10 minutes using mpeg-4, and about 15 minutes using H.264 on a 2Ghz MacBook Pro.
I’m not sure if it is directly related to the speed of your DVD drive as well as processor speed. In a Dual 2Ghz G5 with a 5X DVD-Rom Drive it took about 2 hours and 16 minutes to do one whole movie. Just over real-time.
Instant Handbreak is a great, easy to use solution to get your DVD content onto your iPod…If you try it and you like it, think about contributing to the cause over here