First, Handbrake opens the selection screen, but this screen is fairly superfluous, unless you have multiple DVD drives. Apple’s DVD player will start just close it. Here’s how to do it: Insert a DVD into your Mac. Basic movie ripping is fairly simple. How to Rip DVDs to Your Mac.
![]() Handbrake Instructions Full Version Of HandBrakeBut things have changed quite a bit since then. Although the full version of HandBrake worked well back in early 2006, it wasn’t the easiest app to use HandBrake Lite offered the functionality most people needed with a simpler interface. HandBrake is a free, downloadable program that lets users convert to and from a number of audio and video formats, including ripping DVDs straight to video.Since that time, Apple has released the Apple TV and the iPhone improved the video-playing capabilities of the fifth-generation iPod and increased the amount of hard-drive space in the company’s laptops—giving us even more reason to want to convert our DVDs to widely-playable video files.HandBrake, HandBrake Lite’s full-featured sibling, can do just that. If you do not already have HandBrake.First, via the Title pop-up, you choose the section of the DVD you want to convert. However, I personally do that only when HandBrake has a problem ripping the original DVD.)After a scan of the DVD or VIDEO_TS folder, HandBrake will display its main screen, where you choose your conversion options. (For what it’s worth, the developers of HandBrake recommend ripping a DVD to your hard drive first and then converting the resulting VIDEO_TS folder in HandBrake. To convert a DVD, simply select the DVD itself to convert a DVD you’ve already ripped to your hard drive (using a tool such as MacTheRipper), choose the VIDEO_TS folder that resulted. Well, I decided to fix that—and to give myself a URL I can provide whenever the question of converting DVDs for iPod/iPhone/Apple TV/laptops arises (which it does frequently).When you first launch HandBrake, you’ll see Mac OS X’s familiar Open dialog. Besides an improved interface, version 0.9.0 provides better picture quality, better performance, useful conversion presets, and lots of advanced features there’s even a command-line version for Terminal-loving types.Oddly enough, despite the many times we’ve recommended HandBrake over the past couple years, we’ve never actually rated it.![]() Most Mac users will want to choose MP4 format and either MPEG-4 Video / AAC Audio or AVC/H.264 Video / AAC Audio for Codecs.Overall, the quality of converted video using HandBrake’s presets is very good according to the developer, each preset is designed to offer an appropriate compromise between video quality, speed of ripping, and file size given the target device. And there are many options available, including frame rate, bit rate, video size and dimensions, audio quality, number of audio channels, and a screen full of really advanced settings that most people shouldn’t touch. Click Start and the conversion process begins.If you know what you’re doing, you can instead go through the various Video, Audio & Subtitles, Chapters, and Advanced settings and choose the exact options you want to use. (You shouldn’t use this setting when converting video for iPod or iPhone.)Finally, one feature you’ll find useful when ripping individual TV-show episodes from DVD is HandBrake’s queue. And HandBrake now offers anamorphic encoding when converting a movie for viewing on a widescreen display such as an Apple TV or Sony PSP. I use the Slow setting, which provides good results without slowing down the conversion process too much.I also generally enable Chapter Markers in the Chapters tab this setting applies MP4 chapter markers wherever an actual DVD chapter occurs, letting you jump between chapters on an iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV using the Forward and Back buttons. For example, I’ve found HandBrake’s Deinterlace setting (in the Picture Settings window, accessible via the Video tab) to be useful in eliminating the line-ish artifacts that occur when converting some movies and TV shows. ![]() In most cases it isn’t actually stuck it’s just that the last step sometimes takes a long time.)What if you’ve already purchased the excellent VisualHub ? You could use MacTheRipper to rip your DVDs and then use VisualHub, which also has an Apple TV conversion preset, to convert the resulting VIDEO_TS folders to MP4 files. (Note that HandBrake at times appears to get stuck at the 100% mark. A progress bar at the bottom of the window lets you monitor the rip’s progress, although it’s not something you want to sit and watch that’s the digital equivalent of watching paint dry. “Lesser” Macs—especially G4 Macs, but even G5-based models—will take much longer. The process took approximately 1 hour, 45 minutes. HandBrake ripped and converted the DVD in exactly one hour—surprisingly, only a minute longer than it took to convert the already-ripped version from the hard drive—making a HandBrake rip-and-convert the fastest of the three processes by a slim margin.Looking at the resulting videos, the HandBrake conversion was 1.9GB in size, compared to 863MG for the VisualHub version. VisualHub converted the same VIDEO_TS folder in 45 minutes, 43 seconds, for a total time of just over one hour, one minute. In both HandBrake and VisualHub, I used the built-in Apple TV conversion preset.MacTheRipper ripped the movie to a VIDEO_TS folder on my hard drive in 15 minutes, 30 seconds HandBrake converted that folder to an H.264 video file in just over 59 minutes, for a total process time of approximately 1 hour, 15 minutes. Make calendar tabs visible in outlook for mac(Of course, you can tweak the settings in either app to produce larger or smaller file sizes. And the truth is, neither looks considerably better than the other at full-screen size on a 1680 by 1050 display, although HandBrake produces a true widescreen video VisualHub gives you a standard image with black bars on the top and bottom.
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