“The beta period is over,” Jeffrey Mincey writes for Mac360. “The great HandBrake 1.x, in development for a dozen years as a beta version, now is available to rip and burn DVD movies on your Mac. The most versatile and very geeky Mac utility converts almost any video source to MPEG-4 movies.”
“Guess what? The family’s oldest iMac– the last Mac model that came with a built-in SuperDrive, and the only Mac on the Mincey Plantation that has one– still holds the last DVD ejected from the SuperDrive from two years ago,” Mincey writes. “We haven’t burned a DVD or even used a DVD on a Mac for two years. Once HandBrake got the DVD movie collection to reside on the home media server, we’re DVD free. The last DVD player we bought was $35 from Best Buy. It’s been used. Once. To see if it would work. It did.”
Mincey writes, “If you don’t mind getting your geek on and you have a SuperDrive (or any recent or decent DVD player recorder) and the requisite DVD movie collection, you’ll like HandBrake 1.x… Now, if HandBrake could capture a Netflix stream, that would be something to write home about because, for all intents and purposes, the DVD party is over.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: What’s a DVD?
Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt. — Steve Jobs, October 2008
SEE ALSO:
HandBrake 1.0.0 released after 13 years in development – December 27, 2016
HandBrake is the cross-platform go-to utility for video transcoding more so than it is a “DVD ripper”.
Yup… Mactheripper was the DVD ripper I used is the past. Handbrake is what I use for transcoding.
I’m still working my way through my dvd collection and I actually still buy things from time to time once they become cheaper to buy than digital versions.
Those bargain bins are your friend. I just saw Saving Private Ryan a few days ago for $3.99.
Even with the cheapo JVC HDTV I have at home, I still find it rather painful to watch those standard-def DVDs. I mean, once you see HD, you have a hard time going back to SD.
My wife epitomises the Luddite mindset when it comes to tech (she refuses a touchscreen phone!), and continues to claim that “there was nothing wrong with the 15″ Sony Trinitron” she had in her room when growing up. And even she no longer bothers with the old DVDs (never mind VHS), and has already bought a few of the same titles in Blu-ray.
Technology marches on and I can’t imagine spending money (or effort) to acquire SD content anymore.
I agree with you 100%
So what you are saying is that your ‘cheapo JVC HDTV’ doesn’t upscale?
The function exists there, but it is off. When the original material only has 480 horisontal lines of video, upscaling it to 1080 lines doesn’t miraculously make up new details that didn’t exist before. It obviously can’t. All it does is duplicates the existing pixels. What’s worse is, since exact duplication of pixels gives us 960 lines, and the image needs to have 1080 lines, every ninth line is duplicated twice (in order to fill up 1080 lines). There is really nothing that “upscaling” can do that TV doesn’t already do by stretching SD image to fit the HD screen.
Except that some content just isn’t (and not likely to ever be) in any other format than SD. A lot of esoteric stuff just isn’t to be found in HD, let alone UHD or 4K.
Besides, just because some people (like the author of this article) have sold their souls (not mention their rationality) to the false god of convenience and are so in love with digital/streaming/etc. that they can’t see beyond the end of their nose, doesn’t mean disc based content is dead.
The’s an old expression that “it’s better to be silent and thought a fool, rather than open one’s mouth an remove any doubt.”
Over the past decade I’ve heard a lot of yapping about one thing or another being obsolete.
Fools baying at the moon.
It gets even worse once you start watching 4K UHD discs on a 4K TV!
Handbrake is an amazing and free product. For videophiles who just want to really manage files and transcoding and all that. I used to do all that until I got sick of all the work and file management. All iTunes since and that’s a couple hours a month of time I’ve recovered.
Worked great to convert videos into a format that could be used on an iPad.
Dad was the envy of all the other patients on the hospital floor. They had television’s that hardly worked and he had all sorts of great videos on his iPad.
BluRay DVDs hold HD and in some cases 4K video. Handbrake can convert those files.
For less than the price of a movie ticket you can buy a BluRay with 1080 and some even include an iTunes download.
Hate to tell you, but the HD video off of a BluRay is higher quality than the compressed video that gets streamed
I guess some people like renting stuff. I prefer to own.
There is also stuff on BluRay and DVD that will never be seen on Netflix or any on demand service.
Content worth listening to or watching is worth buying. Any content that can be DRMed can be stripped.
Just because the writer of this article can afford not to have all of his movies on DVD, doesn’t mean all of us have that luxury.
For those of us who still have TONS of DVD movies and private family videos on DVD, Handbreak is still useful.
Here’s hoping the developer keeps improving the product. There are those that appreciate it VERY much.
I feel the author’s parochial view of what HandBrake is renders his assessment moot. I rely on HandBrake to make Apple TV-compatible videos for my clients. I take ProRes QuickTime movies (complete with chapter markers) out of Adobe Media Encoder, throw them into HandBrake and make great looking videos with small data footprints. Then I throw them into MetaZ to add the artwork and meta data. Plus, since HandBrake and MetaZ are both license free, I can have three or four hex core Mac Pros transcoding a variety of videos while I’m still cutting in Premiere on another machine. Yes, the DVD party might be over, but I don’t think we should poo-poo Pages (or other word processing programs) simply because we rarely print on paper anymore.
Older versions of Handbrake, 0.9.3 and earlier were very capable of breaking the data protection encryption schemes in protected DVDs.
Something legai happenned with HandBrake, because versions 0.9.4 and to present releases, eliminated HandBrake’s ability to break ANY of these DVD encryption schemes.
Fortunately, I am one to save older software versions and older versions up to 0.9.3, can still RIP a DVD that contains older data encryption and some newer data encryption schemes.
Thank god I keep multiple backups of older software versions.
Only the most recent DVD/Blu-ray data encryption schemes and new encryption scheme that Disney movies use are the only ones that my older Handbrake versions and newer versions of HandBrake can’t RIP an identical quality movie/TV show file from.
You can still RIP a lesser quality version, but cannot RIP an identical quality DVD version to your computer to play on any device or computer.
http://www.macdvdripperpro.com/
With the more recent versions of Handbrake, you have to install LibDVDCSS.
For all the details on what software to use got to:
http://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/mac/how-rip-dvd-to-mac-apple-3634696/.
In Australia our digital laws are so out of date that until 2006 it was illegal to make a copy of a TV program with a vcr and it is still illegal to do an online search. And I never heard of any prosecutions on that score.
However, I dream of the day when we have a comprehensive fair use policy (and they are talking about it) whereby you can make legal copies of dvds/blu-rays that you own by yourself or your representative Then I can set up my post retirement business.
At least I have the early retirement but I’m running out of years waiting for our luddite A’stralian (correct pronunciation starts with a short ‘A”) pollies to get their act together.
this idjit lives in a tiny little mac bubble (which is still fucking tiny and insignificant compared the the windows linux world)..
your mac can’t burn a dvd anymore.. but any other PC on the market sure can, BLU-RAY included.
Talk about living in a bubble.
So sorry to burst it, but Macs can do all those things. Yep, even Blu-rays.
… if you buy a separate blu ray player and the needed software.
Well, I guess me and my old iMac, 2008 vintage, just don’t fit in with the MDN world anymore.
I’ll keep on using my iMac and Handbrake to rip kids DVDs for our iPads.
I’ve tried the new version on two movies and it’s much slower than version 0.10.5. As such I’ve downgraded back to the latter version
Now, if HandBrake could capture a Netflix stream
There are ways. But the question is: Why bother?
Regarding Blu-ray: It’s cheap to use now!
• Cheap players
• Cheap writers
• Cheap media
But that hasn’t made it popular. I visited a Best Buy last month and stumped the floor walkers when I pointed to a shelf sign that said they sold Blu-ray writable media. They had no idea. They had NEVER seen it in the store. So sorry Sony.
There have been at least TWO publicly announced successors to the Blu-ray standard. Neither of them became real. Dead end tech, apparently.
All you nerds and your 4K obsession.
DVDs are like CDs, a bargain hunter’s dream.
I wanna watch a movie, not have an orgasm about how awesome my home theater is.