by on January 5, 2011 Leave a Comment

DVD Ripping Software Handbrake Get’s Major Update

I’m in love with my new Apple TV so it shouldn’t be too surprising that the last few posts have been video related. I’ve talked about Handbrake before. It’s a great one stop application for ripping and converting your DVD collection to a number of Mac friendly formats. The other day it received a major overhaul.

While not apparent on the Handbrake website this new version adds some great tweaks to the existing feature set including:

  • BluRay disc structure support. (No decryption support)
  • Updated Libraries (x264, ffmpeg)
  • SSA Subtitle support. (Including burn-in)
  • MP3 audio now supported in MP4 files (Note: Limited Player compatibility)
  • VOBSUB subtitle now supported in MP4 files (Note: Limited Player compatibility)
  • Updated Presets for newer devices and better quality
  • AC3 encoding support.
  • Improved DVD Main Feature detection (when using dvdnav)
  • Universal audio downmix support (all audio types can be downmixed)
  • Point*to*Point encoding (second or frame start and end times)
  • Peak framerate option (Capped VFR)

All GUIs

  • Updated x264 Advanced Panel
  • Video Quality Slider drops % value and only shows RF for x264
  • Batch Scan (Scan Multiple files at once. N.B: Does not include multiple VIDEO_TS folders / Image files)
  • Many Bug fixes
  • Many Tweaks to improve usability.
  • Ability to edit queue jobs

Mac GUI

  • New Audio Panel supporting >4 Audio Tracks
  • VLC detection in /Applications and ~/Applications
  • Multiple instance support

The ability to read the Blu-ray disc structure. This allows Handbrake to rip Blu-ray discs much easier than it did before. It still won’t decrypt them but there are other tools for that.

by on December 30, 2010 Leave a Comment

Control What Happens When You Insert A DVD or CD

When you insert a CD or DVD player into your Mac the OS X detects the disc type and then will launch the appropriate program. With CDs it will launch iTunes, with DVDs it will launch the DVD player. In most cases, this is exactly what you want to happen. However, if you want to prevent the DVD Player application from launching when you insert a DVD or iTunes from launching when you insert a CD then you need to turn these actions off.

I have my DVD player setup so that it doesn’t launch any application when you insert a disc. You can also customize it to open a different application. The first step is to open the System Preferences. Then, click the CDs & DVD preference

When you click on this it opens the preferences that lets you set the action you want to take for each device.

CDs & DVDs Preference showing Disc menu

If you insert a blank DVD or CD you can specify whether or not to launch a disc burning application. The default, Ask what to do is generally a good setting for blanks.

If you insert a disc with content on it, music, pictures or video you can take additional actions. The options above the horizontal line are default behaviors. If you click Open other application you can browse to a specific OS X application. Run script is useful if you have any custom actions you want to perform on the disc. Finally, Ignore will do nothing. For DVDs, I prefer Ignore.

by on December 29, 2010 Leave a Comment

Essential Tools for Ripping DVD and Blu-Ray DVDs

There are a number of reasons you would want to rip your DVDs to your Mac. When you rip your collection onto your Mac you can load it into iTunes, copy it to your iPod, iPad or iPhone, play it via Front Row or stream it to your Apple TV. Whatever the reason, before your go and purchase software to help your rip your disks take a look at this list of FREE tools.

VideoLAN – VideoLAN (VLC) is a free media player that can pretty much play every format you throw at it including DVDs. You generally need this as part of your ripping tool chain because other programs like Handbrake and Fairmount use VLC to decrypt DVDs

Fairmount – Fairmount is a free program that will mount DVDs in a way that allows you to rip the content off the disc. Normally if you try to copy files from a DVD it will fail because DVDs are encrypted to prevent you from copying the files. Fairmount uses VLC to “mount” the DVD as an unencrypted disk image.  Fairmount is a free utility that comes with DVDRemaster. You can download the demo and continue to use Fairmount after it expires.

MetaX -MetaX is a tagger for MP4 files. It will allow you to lookup the names of DVDs on multiple websites and import the DVD information as metadata on your MP4 file. This will allow the content to properly show up with artwork and descriptions in Apple TV, and iTunes.

Handbrake – Handbrake is an open source transcoder that will take a video file in one format and convert it to another format. This is typically used to rip a DVD to an Apple compatible video file. If you want to use other tools with Handbrake you may also need to download HandbrakeCLI, a version of Handbrake without the GUI.

MakeMKV – MakeMKV will read and decrypt DVDs and Blu-Ray DVDs.

Elgato Turbo.264- If you are ripping a lot of discs you should invest in this piece of hardware. It’s basically a USB plug that will speed up the conversion of your DVDs to Apple compatible file formats.

Automator – Automator is a scripting tool that comes with OS X. It allows you to build workflows to help you convert video. It basically can be used to tie the various tools together to make the conversion process automated.

If you know of any other tools to rip DVDs that you just can’t live without, let us know in the comments section.

by on November 5, 2009 Leave a Comment

Easily Copy Your DVD collection to iTunes, iPhone or iPod

If you would like to rip DVDs onto your OSX system there are less options than on a Windows PC. However, the software that is available is very good. Today we are going to take a look at Handbrake. A very easy to use DVD ripping program that will take DVDs and convert them into a plethora of formats.

If you want to rip DVDs for the iPod, AppleTV, TiVo or just to watch on your Mac Book then Handbrake is the application for you.

To get started, you need to first install Handbrake onto your system.

  1. Download the file from the Handbrake website
  2. Install Handbrake into your Applications Folder
  3. Launch Handbrake, then follow along with the video below

As you can see Handbrake does an excellent job of easily allowing you to load your DVD collection into your Mac. The next time you are on a trip, you don’t have to bore yourself with things like reading. Open up iTunes or VLC and you’re ready to go.