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 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 June 25, 2008 3 Comments

Use Spaces to organize the OS X desktop

Today’s installment of Learning OS X features the application Spaces. Spaces allows you to organize your OS X desktop by grouping your applications into virtual desktops or “Spaces”. If you like to multitask then the Spaces application will help you organize your desktop into various contexts. In this example I create two Spaces, one for personal information management and one for web browsing.

Let’s begin by enabling Spaces. Click the System Preferences and select Expose and Spaces. This will open the Spaces configuration window. There are two buttons labeled Expose and Spaces. Make sure that Spaces is selected. Select the check box Enable Spaces to turn on Spaces.

The application allows you to configure a number of Spaces by adding and removing rows and columns. For this example, I will setup two Spaces.

In addition, you can assign specific applications to open on a specific Space. I am specifying Safari to open in Space two and the Address book to open in Space one.

There are keyboard shortcuts to easily switch between spaces. The default behavior that I use most frequently is the Control key plus the left and right arrows to switch between these spaces.

Close the System Preferences and try out your new Space. Open Safari and your Address book. You will see that they open on two different Spaces. Use the Control + Left Arrow and Control + Right Arrow to switch between the two Spaces.

Spaces is a great way to organize your desktop. If you have any interesting uses for Spaces tell us about it.