“If you’re a Mac user interested in ripping your commercial DVDs to a format playable on an Apple TV, iPod, or iPhone, the free video transcoder, HandBrake 0.9.3, is one of the easiest ways to go about it,” Christopher Breen reports for Macworld. “With a copy of the free VLC installed on your Mac, HandBrake can rip most DVDs made today, and the results it produces are quite watchable.”
Breen reports, “But suppose you want to go beyond the defaults—tweak HandBrake to produce videos that take up less room on your iPod, dispense with a movie’s closing credits, or bear subtitles? It’s all possible with HandBrake, but it takes some tweaking,”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Brawndo Drinker” for the heads up.]
Is MacTheRipper getting too old or is is it still update?
How does MTR compare to HB?
@deepdish
I don’t think MacTheRipper has been updated lately. The most recent version I have for it is 3.0, created in 2007.
IMHO MTR has become passé. I used to have the desire to archive my DVDs. But by integrating VLC, handbrake fulfills my needs very nicely. I rarely have a DVD that I can’t import without issues such as video artifacts or scrambled video and/or sound.
Hand Break and Mac the Ripper are great apps. The let use your DVDs like you should be able to. Now we need something for the Mac to rip BD.
Handbrake has surpassed mactheripper with features and it is still under active development. The latest version only supports Leopard.
Handbrake is a very good app but if you want to rip a movie quickly then go with MTR… takes forever to rip one DVD or a whole 15 minutes for a 7GB DVD with mtr on my 8 core mac pro
Yep, I have 8 cores and everything is 64 bit as well.
And that’s just my netbook.
So there.
i may get flamed for this, but i’ve found the best way is to decrypt with DVDFab (free, Windows, i use it on a spare laptop), then encode with handbrake on my mac. Much better decryption than MTR or HB, which often fail and take much longer than DVDFab.
I use TimeCapsule or FreeNAS as a server between the two.
It’s then ready to go on my iPhone, iPod touch and my AppleTV.
Dvdfab is not free
@jtc
HandBrake and MacTheRipper do two different things. MTR just rips the file straight from the disc. HB can take that rip and encode it into a video playable from a multitude of devices. MTR will just let you play the movie in DVD Player.app. The reason HB takes so much longer, jtc, is because it is decrypting, ripping, and encoding on the fly. MTR is just decrypting and ripping.
Also, MTR takes 15 minutes to rip a 7GB DVD onto your 8 core Mac? Jeesh, my 1Ghz Dualie G4 only take 20 minutes.
DVDFab is free if you are only using the decryption part of it. It’s the rest of it (the encoding part that HandBrake will do for you) that costs.
I ripped a DVD on my old emac once, took a day and a half.
I use to use MTR but now use RipIt, which is not free but constantly updated and has never failed to work.
HB and VLC are great. I used to use VisualHub for things but it’s no longer being developed.
I’ve been using Handbrake for a couple of years now, and it has been a great app. The linked tutorial is an excellent resource for using some of the more advanced settings, though, and I’m glad that they posted it. We need more useful articles like this from trade magazines, and much less bloviating.
You can use vlc to rip DVDs now as of v1.0
Apple universal is nice because it makes a gorgeous version for my iPhone and it’s pretty damn watchable streaming to the 360. Unfortunately, and this drives me nuts, there doesn’t seem to be any surround sound option.
This is the kind of article I wish MDN would bring to our attention more often.
Great file conversion for the iPhone or any iPod? iSquint does it for me.
Sorry, but what’s a DVD ?
Oh yea, that’s right, where a divx comes from before it goes to Bit Torrent or Usenet
Think I’ve also seen ’em for sale at Wal-Mart …
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BC
(will say this for HB, saved my ass couple times when could only find a PAL online, then it spit out “whatever”)
I don’t do much ripping at all, but with a four-year-old girl and mountains of disks and cases all over the place getting damaged, I’m going to start working on a home AppleTV/DVR solution.
Here’s a Q: I prefer the full-blown DVD images that play in iDVD over just the video ripped by Handbrake, because we all really like watching some of the awesome special features on modern DVDs, as well as being able to turn on closed captions in different languages — can Front Row or AppleTV handle those types of videos streaming from a home server? Does anyone else prefer wholly-ripped DVDs like this and have any tips? TIA
@ TheMacGod: when encoding with Handbrake, I select the audio with the Dolby ProLogic II 48Khz 160kbps sountrack as first, with the AC3 soundtrack as second. The first let’s you play it in iPhone, the other for AppleTV/XB360 surround sound. This assumes you can select soundtrack like you can select English or French vocals on a standard DVD.
HS NetworkGuy: I also like the idea of full DVD images to toggle subtitles on/off and other soundtracks like Director notes, but these just won’t play on iPhone, which is how I get to watch most movies now. Wife doesn’t like action flicks much. What with 2TB drives on the market, it’s tempting to stash movies digitally…..
Does anyone know of an alternative to VisualHub? I’m just a bit concerned that over time it’ll stop working. The app absolutely rocks for .mkv files being converted into dvd files. Likewise the final quality in Toast is inferior to VisualHub
MacTheRipper is still in development and apparently isn’t far from a major update. RipIt will only work on Leopard and beyond whilst MacTheRipper will work on Tiger and Leopard. The delay in MTR’s development was caused by the marriage breakup of the guy behind the app. as well as a complete rewrite of MTR.
i still use VisualHub, but videomonkey.org is a new alternative.
free and it is based on the same code as VH.
I heard the developer of RipIt, Jason, took off and sold the app to TheLittleAppFactory. Ever since the change of ownership people have been complaining.
Thanks Boogle and luke I’ll check them out after I upgrade from Tiger to Snow Leopard.