Review: Handbrake a rippin’ good app for 5G iPod owners
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Oct 6, 2006 at 12:20am
If you own a 5G (video enabled) iPod, you should add Handbrake to your arsenal of iPod/iTunes accessories. It’s a multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 ripper/converter that was originally available on the BeOS (which once almost became the foundation for the “next generation” Mac operating system—but that’s another story) and has been ported to Mac OS X.
In other words, you can use Handbrake to “rip” DVDs and other video files for viewing on your iPod. Right now I have the final episode of the late, great, lamented TV series Nowhere Man on my iPod. It was converted from a disc in the nine-DVD Nowhere Man box set. Handbrake is easy to use, it’s free and it’s speedy. For example, using the software on a 24-inch iMac, it took approximately 23 minutes to “rip” the two-hour (minus commercials) Nowhere Man episode, condensing it into a 195.4MB file.
Handbrake is a Universal Binary product, so runs natively on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. It can encode directly from DVDs (even encrypted ones) or from VIDEO_TS folders. It supports: AC3, LPCM and MPEG audio tracks; two-pass encoding; encoding of two audio tracks; and picture deinterlacing, cropping and scaling. It outputs MP4, AVI, OGM, AAC, MP3 and Vorbis audio files. It also includes a bitrate calculator. However, Handbrake does have its limitations. It doesn’t handle DTS audio tracks or single VOB files. If you have a DVD-ROM with random video files saved on it (AVI, MPG, WMV, MOV, etc), Handbrake won’t be able to convert these files. And it needs to be updated to support the new compression scheme of new and updated (firmware) video iPods, namely 640 by 480 pixels.
The first time I used Handbrake I was surprised at how easy it was to use. I won’t go into all the steps here—there’s a great walk-through tutorial at tutorial at methodshop.com—but, basically, you put a video DVD into your Mac and
Handbrake will scan it (this make take up to a minute or two depending on the contents of the DVD and the speed of your optical drive). There are a variety of options to make sure you “rip” the file you want, save it where you want and choose the best formatting for your needs (frame rates, quality, audio settings, etc.).
When it comes to codecs, you can choose either AVC/H.264 or MPEG-4. An H264 file will take twice as long to encode as a MP4, but it’s smaller in file size. If speed’s not an issue for you, select H264. However, if you select H264, you must also choose the Baseline profile as your encoder in the Video section. I recommend MPEG-4. The software even estimates how long it will take to rip the file, a nice touch.
There are a couple of things that could be done to make this very good app even better. But this is far and away best program that I’ve found for converting DVDs for viewing on an iPod (something I admittedly rarely do) and backing up DVDs to my hard drive.
System requirements: Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later.
Macsimum rating: 8 out of 10.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 10,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
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