Handbrake love
With work and other extra-curricular hobbies (like biking, squash, photography), I have been looking for more ways to use my idle time for my leisure time. My time spent driving to and from work, time often extended by traffic, has already been used by listening to audio books from Audible. But there are times that I lounge around in a coffee shop, whether it is after lunch or during early mornings before work. I will soon be enrolling in a gym where I would probably spend some time on a stationary bike or on a treadmill.
So enter Handbrake and my iPod Touch. One reason why I bought the iPod Touch was to keep updated on my religiously-watched TV shows. Now I plan to use the iPod Touch to watch movies that I want to watch but can’t find the time to watch.
If you are eager to try, you will need to consider two things. First, the settings can get quite technical. You could get besieged by such terms like framerate, bitrate, and anamorphic. If you really want to understand the innards of Handbrake, then head on over to their wiki site. If all you want is to rip a DVD to watch on your iPod Touch, then you can read this.
I tweaked the Handbrake settings for my iPod Touch, mainly turning on the 2-pass encoding as well as boosting the average bitrate to 2500 kbps. Here is a screenshot of my settings:
Second, ripping and encoding a DVD for the iPod will take some time. I have a 2Ghz Intel Core Duo Macbook Pro with 1GB of memory, and the process took almost as long as the DVD itself!
And after taking a snack and having a nap, I was ready to watch my newly ripped DVD.
December 25 2007 09:29 pm | Software and Video and iPod
