The iPad is a great way to watch movies on the go. But getting your films into your iPad--or your Mac--isn’t as easy as it should be. Apple would love you to purchase them from the iTunes Store, but paying again for a movie that you already own on DVD doesn’t make much sense. Thankfully, all the tools you need to convert your collection into iTunes-compatible files are readily available and easy to use once you get the hang of the workflow.
The first step in this process is transferring the movie from your DVD onto your Mac. Sadly, it isn’t as simple as dragging the files from the disc to your drive because of the copy-protection schemes that movie studios use to keep you from enjoying the content you paid for. Various applications exist that can help you rip your DVDs, but by far the easiest is The Little App Factory’s RipIt (ripitapp.com). RipIt isn’t free, but it does offer a free trial version that will let you rip 10 discs so that you can check it out before spending $19.95.
RipIt makes saving a DVD to your Mac a one-click affair.
RipIt is capable of copying nearly all existing DVDs, and its interface is incredibly simple: launch the application, insert a DVD and click on the Rip button. That’s it. After a while a perfect copy will appear in your Movies folder (you can choose a different destination from the Preferences window). The resulting files are exact copies of your DVDs, including menus and special features. In fact, you can even use DVD Player on your Mac to play back these files. But since they are exact copies, they’re several gigabytes in size.
To make your movies both smaller and compatible with your iPad, your best option is HandBrake (free, handbrake.fr). This is an incredibly powerful program designed to transform many different types of media into H.264, a format that will work on any of Apple’s mobile devices.
Don't let HandBrake myriad options scare you off.
Crunch time. Launch HandBrake and select the DVD file you just transferred to your Mac. By default, HandBrake will assume that the track with the longest duration is the movie you’re interested in transcoding, but you can always change this by clicking on the Title pop-up menu (top left of the interface). All the other parameters may look a little intimidating if you’ve never used the program before, which is why HandBrake comes with a series of presets. If they’re not immediately apparent, you can reveal them by clicking on the Toggle Presets icon at the top right of the interface. The first time you use HandBrake, click on the cogwheel button at the bottom of the Presets sidebar and select Update Built-in Presets to get the latest settings.
Since the iPad is such a new device, there wasn’t a preset designed for it at press time. Choose Universal from the Apple list. Once selected, click Start, and HandBrake will take care of the rest. Depending on the horsepower of your Mac, this transcoding process can take up to a few hours. Thankfully, Handbrake will let you queue up several projects and run them sequentially when your Mac is unused--we like to leave our Mac churning away converting video overnight while we sleep.
DIY encoding settings. If you’re a little more adventurous, you can experiment with the settings. For instance, a 2.5-hour movie will take up roughly 1.5GB using the Universal preset and the quality will be good for viewing on the iPad. If you wanted to create a file that will look equally great on your TV, click on the Average Bitrate button from the Video tab’s Quality section. Set it to 2500kbps, which would create a very high-quality file with a size nearing 3.0GB--less than ideal if you’ve bought a 16GB iPad. The lowest acceptable quality is around 750kbps or so. If you were to use that setting, you’d end up with a file size of around 1.4GB, saving yourself 100MB over the Universal setting--which could prove crucial when you have a limited amount of space. Ultimately it comes down to personal preference, and we recommend experimenting with a few short videos to find your own sweet spot for file size vs. image quality.
As a side note, you could transcode your movie straight from the DVD, bypassing RipIt altogether. In order to do this, download and install VLC (free, videolan.org/vlc), an open-source media player that also contains libraries HandBrake can use to read commercial DVDs from your Mac’s optical drive. Be aware, though, that--due to modern copy-protection techniques--this process doesn’t always work, which is why RipIt is a better option. With the transcoding completed, you’ll need to make your film look good on the iPad, which means including a description, cast and crew list, and poster artwork. Thankfully, Subler (code.google.com/p/subler/) can help you acquire and apply all that useful metadata.
After messaging with Subler, your finished file will look just like an iTunes download, complete with metadata and cover art.
Drag the file HandBrake just created onto Subler’s icon to reveal a simple window. Rather than filling in all that information by hand, go to File > Import > Tagchimp. This connects you to an online database of thousands of movies (tagchimp.com), and the odds are high that your film will be listed there. Click Add to apply metadata to your file.
You can, of course, manually edit the information should you need to by double-clicking on any part of it. When you’re done, go to File > Save, then go to File > Optimize, which can clear up any file problems created by editing the metadata.
Once the operation is complete, drag your film into iTunes and sync it to your iPad. Your movie will appear in the Videos app, and it works just like content downloaded from the iTunes Store. Enjoy!
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