Ripping DVD’s to the Hard Drive

While trying to clean-up my “Media Closet” (affectionately referred to as the Server Room), I realized that I have a significant investment in DVD’s which I almost never watch.  The DVDs are cluttering up the closet and the shelves to the point where I decided to pack them all up and store them in the attic — however, I knew as soon as I did that, I (or my wife) would want to watch one of the movies that had been sitting untouched for months.  So, before packing the movies away, I began the Herculean task of ripping the DVD’s to the Mac Mini.

Enter HandBrake

HandBrake is a software program which offers a very simple GUI for ripping DVDs.  This is by no means a “new” application, but it is constantly updated for new features, added stability and convenience profiles.  The profiles are my favorite feature of HandBrake.  They are essentially pre-defined preferences for ripping your DVDs so I don’t need to worry about things like bit-rates, resolution or codecs.  The profiles are generally named after the target for where you intend to watch the ripped DVD, such as iPod, AppleTV, PS3, etc…  There are also profiles for different types of sources such as Animation, Television and Film.

For my purposes, I really just wanted a way to get all movies onto an external 1TB Hard Drive.  For the majority of the movies, I ended up using the iPhone/iPod Touch settings.  I felt the picture quality was good enough when converted using the H264 codec, however, I did change the audio settings to use AC-3 passthrough for the Dolby Digital sound track (for some reason, I’m willing to give up a bit  of picture quality, but I hate to sacrifice my digital surround sound).  At this setting, most movies came through around 1GB per movie.  For some of the more visually interesting movies, I bumped the settings up to the “AppleTV” profile, which resulted in a file closer to 3GB, but I was more than willing to surrender a few extra GB of hard drive space in order to complete clear out the bookshelves of movies.

The biggest drawback of any encoding project is the time.  For the iPhone settings I was using, it worked out to about 1 hour per movie.  To speed things along, I installed HandBrake on three different computers so I could rip 3 movies at once.  After one day, I’m sitting at about 30 encoded movies.  Not the best way to spend a weekend, but the thought is if I can kick off a few movies a night after work, then I’ll eventually reclaim my bookshelves.  (well, enough that I can repopulate the shelves with BluRay movies and PS3/Xbox360 games….)

I’ve only found two slight weaknesses with HandBrake.  First, I could not find a way to rip the movies and maintain the DTS source.  All the options appeared to do some sort of downconversion to Dolby Digital.  I’m pretty sure other apps do allow this, but I wasn’t willing to give up the ease of use offered by HandBrake.  Second, HandBrake can be a bit of a pain when dealing with DVDs with multiple episodes (such as TV DVDs with 7 or so episodes per disk).  HandBrake automatically finds the longest video file on the disk and pre-fills the GUI with that particular file.  After that, you need to manually look through the other clips on the disk and set up a queue for the other files and give them each names.  I wouldn’t mind some sort of automated step to help assist with that part.

Otherwise, HandBrake did exactly what I wanted it do.  It was very easy to burn through several disks in a day, and some day soon, I’ll have a very nice digital collection on my external hard drive.

One final note — in order to get around Copy Protection, HandBrake suggests installing VLC player.  Pretty much anyone who has attempted using a PC or Mac to watch movies has come across VLC, but if not, it’s a painless install and it’s required to get the most out of HandBrake.