My pick for this week is Handbrake.
I know that a lot of you might be using an iPad and you might have a lot of movies on DVD. However, what if you want to put them onto your iPad? Well, you can’t just go in the, take the video files from the DVD itself and stick them on the iPad. That won’t work. These files need to be converted before they can be put onto your iPad. That’s where a neat little tool called Handbrake comes in.
Now, here is where I need to straighten out an issue. In the US and the UK, you can legally use Handbrake to convert your original DVD movies that you own to a format that is playable on your devices. However, you will need to check the laws in your respective country with regards to DVD ripping. It’s against the law to do this with movies you have rented from NetFlix, LoveFilm, your local library etc.
The way that it works, is you have to put your DVD into your computer and launch Handbrake. You will then need to choose your DVD as the source. From there, you can choose what type of device you want to optimize the movie for. For example, you can customize the settings so that it’s ready for your iPad. Then, you have to choose which “title” and “chapters” you want to load onto your computer. With the title, you want to make sure that it’s the longest one. If you want the entire movie, you would want to make sure that you choose all of the chapters. However, you can change this if you want to get a special feature from a movie such as a “making of” documentary. However, if you want to use this with just a standard video file(such as a video of a baby that you took using a video camera) and convert it for use on an iPad, then you can. All you have to do is point the source field in the Handbrake main window to your video and you’re good to go.
If you’re a power user and feel brave enough, you can then get in there and start customizing all of the different settings such as what type of codec you want to use, what subtitles you want, the frame-rate you want and so on.
You might be someone who likes things to be automated, so Handbrake has a queue feature where you can line up a bunch of conversions so that it will do one and move onto the next.
I’ve used handbrake a lot and I’ve found it really useful, especially when I wanted to take a movie on my laptop for watching on the road. However I did not want to carry the box with me. I have to say that handbrake is easy to use and can come in quite handy especially when you need to make a copy of film that you own. True, there are extra things which you can change about the conversion you’re doing. That being said, if you want to just say
Handbrake is free and available for Windows, Mac and Linux.