The other day, my 2.5-year old son came up to me as I was washing the dishes. He tugged my leg and shouted, "Paw-pah, I wanna watch dis moo-vee" and in his cute little hand was a shiny Peter Pan DVD. The first thought I had was, "Whoa, he knows how to open the DVD player," because the disc was still in the player from the last time we watched it. The second thought, which came as soon as the first thought ended, was "Yikes! Don't mess up the disc!"

 

After I cleaned my son's fingerprints off the DVD, I popped it in the player. Fortunately, the DVD was fine. And as my son watched the movie, I decided that it was time to back up some of our DVDs and put the rest of my library into storage. This is a job for Handbrake, an open source utility that lets you rip commercially-made DVDs to your hard drive. I had been using HandBrake 0.7.1, but as it turned out, a new version of Handbrake (0.8.5b1) was released a few weeks ago. Good timing, I thought; I can check out the new Handbrake, back up my wife's first season DVD set of Lost (and Peter Pan after my son is done watching it), and write about Handbrake for my blog.

 

Before we begin with our look at Handbrake, here's something to consider. Handbrake lets you ripped encrypted DVDs to your hard drive, and breaking that encryption is considered a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The MPAA's Dan Glickman has recently stated that managed copying - ripping DVD content for use on an iPod, Mac, or a home server - is acceptable. However, using Handbrake for purposes other than for your own personal viewing is illegal.

 

Handbrake's main interface. Click to see a larger screen shot.

 

Handbrake has a new interface, but it's really not much different from version 0.7.1. The major difference is the Presets pane to the right. Handbrake 0.8.5b1 comes with three presets: Apple TV, iPod, and PS3. Pick one of these three presets to adjust your settings for optimal use for the related device.

 

When you put your DVD in your Mac, you select it as the source in Handbrake. The trickest part of Handbrake is figuring out which file on the DVD is the movie file. In the Title section in the main interface, you get a pull-down menu showing the rippable files on the DVD. The files are identified by time length, so if you're ripping a movie, you can select the file with the longest running time. It can get tricky if you're ripping a DVD with a commentary track or extra features that run the same length as the featured video.

 

Handbrake lets you adjust the picture setting resolution.

 

Click on the Picture Settings button, and you can manually adjust the pixel resolution instead of using a preset. There's also anamorphic widescreen support. Cool.

 

Handbrake supports 5.1 and Dolby Pro Logic II surround sound.

 

On the audio side, Handbrake lets you adjust the sample rate and bit rate. There's also support for surround sound. Want to keep the subtitles? Make sure you turn it on.

 

When you have your settings settled, click on Start, and go do something else. It can take a while to rip a DVD. On a Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5, it took three hours to rip a 45 minute episode of Lost. On a 1GHz PowerBook G4, it took 6 hours to rip a 45-minute episode. Fortunately, Handbrake is a Universal application, so you Intel Mac folks will get much faster results. For example, a 45-minute Lost episode took about an hour to rip on a 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo Intel iMac.

 

You can use Roxio Toast 8 Titanium to make DVDs...

 

...or you can use iDVD.

 

After the videos are ripped, I used Roxio Toast 8 Titanium to create a new DVD (you can also use iDVD). There's a catch: the commercial DVDs are double-sided DVDs capable of holding more data that the single-sided DVDs that I have to use because I don't have a double-layer DVD burner. That's OK with me; I don't need to include the extra features on my movie DVD backups, but it does mean I have to use more discs for my Lost backup. You can try adjusting Handbrake's settings to shrink down file sizes, but you'll sacrifice image and audio quality.