Putting a DVD on your portable media player (PMP)
Wow. I have been researching this for the last few weeks and found a ton of options here. Most of them are more a group of options than a single solution, but it is very possible to do this. And the best part is, most of the software is FREE! Unfortunately, no solution has all of the features I would want, but they come close.
First of all, my favorite is FairUse Wizard. It is very powerful and lets you turn your DVD's into sub 1GB files with very good video quality. This program is packed with features. You can crop the video, getting rid of the black bars on the top and bottom of some DVD's (used to make the movie fit into the 16:9 tv's that DVD supports), get rid of edge artifacts from DVD's made by converting from VHS or recorded off the TV, or you can automatically crop the video to a multitude of sizes so it fills nearly any shape screen you through at it.
After you choose your cropping options you then choose the audio. It lets you choose up to two different audio tracks to record. This is only good if you are going to use the file on the computer; PMP's don't support dual audio tracks, at least not any of the ones I am familiar with. When you choose the track to encode, I recommend using the 2 channel track (sometimes called Dolby Surround) instead of the 5.1 channel. This track has been encoded by the studio to sound good in stereo, while the 5.1 is designed for a surround sound system. FairUse will encode it down to two channels, but it tends to sound a little bit more hollow than the native stereo track. You can even choose which codec you want to use for the audio.
Another nice feature lets you choose how big you want the destination file to be and what resolution and the software takes care of the rest. No more having to try several times to get the settings right, wasting hours in encoding files that end up being too big.
FairUse is great, but is slow. It takes several hours to create a movie file from a DVD. Also, in order to get the movie onto your iPod you have to buy the software or use it in conjunction with another program called Videora.
Videora converts many different files into a PMP friendly format. The great thing is that I haven't found a format it can't convert. I have thrown Divx, VOB, WMV, even FLV (the Flash video format used by popular sites like YouTube) at Videora and it just chews through them and spits out an MPEG file with very little loss of quality. One downside of Videora is that it doesn't support very many resolutions. You can only choose between VGA (640x480) or QVGA (320x240). This is only a slight limitation, however, because it only reduces the video to those smaller resolutions, but if the video is already smaller (say 600x300 for example) it will leave the resolution alone. This is nice because making a video larger doesn't increase the quality of the video just makes the video larger. "But I want my video to play full screen on my PMP" you may be saying. Well, first of all, most PMP's only has a QVGA display, so any file larger than that will have to be shrunk down by the iPod as it is. But even if the video has a resolution smaller than QVGA, the PMP will automatically makes it full screen, so don't worry.
Videora will ask you what Apple iPod device you are using. As long as it isn't a 5G iPod (the iPod Video) then choose any of them whether it is an iPod or not. I use the 6G iPod Classic mode myself. For more details read this article.
There is another option called DVD Decrypter. This program is nice because it doesn't decode the video on the DVD, just copies the MPEG2 file onto your hard drive. That way you don't loose any quality in the first step, but it isn't in the PMP friendly MPEG4 part 2 or H.264 format. You still have to use Videora to make it PMP friendly. The downside of this method is that you have very little control beyond choosing between MPEG4 and H.264 and the bitrate of you output file. I still recommend using FairUse Wizard with Videora.
Some of you out there may be Macintosh users. Most of these programs are for Windows, so they won't help you that much. My advice; buy copy of Windows and put it on your Mac. Ha ha, just kidding. You have it easy, just get Handbrake. It does the whole process from start to finish and is free. I don't know the feature set because I can't use it (I don't have a Mac) but I am sure somebody has written about it on the internet.
Now, what about this MPEG4 part 2 (usually just referred to as MPEG4) and H.264 (also called MPEG4 AVC or MPEG4 part 10) format stuff? MPEG2 is an older video format that is used on DVDs. Quality is good and is still used a lot, but the newer MPEG4 format creates smaller files of the same quality. When you are talking about a file that is between 700 MB and 1.5 GB this is significant. H.264 is a newer format still, with slightly better quality than MPEG4, though not as drastic as the difference between MPEG2 and MPEG4. The downside of H.264 is that it is very complex to decode, requiring the processor in the PMP to work harder. The harder the processor works the more electricity it requires, hurting your battery life. Think of it like dragging a weight on the ground. If you had to choose between a small but heavy object or a light but slightly larger object, which would you be able to drag farther?
There you go. Now go and put all your movies onto your PMP. Don't, however, share these files with others. That is illegal and amounts to stealing. I take no responsibility for your actions, just so you know.
First of all, my favorite is FairUse Wizard. It is very powerful and lets you turn your DVD's into sub 1GB files with very good video quality. This program is packed with features. You can crop the video, getting rid of the black bars on the top and bottom of some DVD's (used to make the movie fit into the 16:9 tv's that DVD supports), get rid of edge artifacts from DVD's made by converting from VHS or recorded off the TV, or you can automatically crop the video to a multitude of sizes so it fills nearly any shape screen you through at it.
After you choose your cropping options you then choose the audio. It lets you choose up to two different audio tracks to record. This is only good if you are going to use the file on the computer; PMP's don't support dual audio tracks, at least not any of the ones I am familiar with. When you choose the track to encode, I recommend using the 2 channel track (sometimes called Dolby Surround) instead of the 5.1 channel. This track has been encoded by the studio to sound good in stereo, while the 5.1 is designed for a surround sound system. FairUse will encode it down to two channels, but it tends to sound a little bit more hollow than the native stereo track. You can even choose which codec you want to use for the audio.
Another nice feature lets you choose how big you want the destination file to be and what resolution and the software takes care of the rest. No more having to try several times to get the settings right, wasting hours in encoding files that end up being too big.
FairUse is great, but is slow. It takes several hours to create a movie file from a DVD. Also, in order to get the movie onto your iPod you have to buy the software or use it in conjunction with another program called Videora.
Videora converts many different files into a PMP friendly format. The great thing is that I haven't found a format it can't convert. I have thrown Divx, VOB, WMV, even FLV (the Flash video format used by popular sites like YouTube) at Videora and it just chews through them and spits out an MPEG file with very little loss of quality. One downside of Videora is that it doesn't support very many resolutions. You can only choose between VGA (640x480) or QVGA (320x240). This is only a slight limitation, however, because it only reduces the video to those smaller resolutions, but if the video is already smaller (say 600x300 for example) it will leave the resolution alone. This is nice because making a video larger doesn't increase the quality of the video just makes the video larger. "But I want my video to play full screen on my PMP" you may be saying. Well, first of all, most PMP's only has a QVGA display, so any file larger than that will have to be shrunk down by the iPod as it is. But even if the video has a resolution smaller than QVGA, the PMP will automatically makes it full screen, so don't worry.
Videora will ask you what Apple iPod device you are using. As long as it isn't a 5G iPod (the iPod Video) then choose any of them whether it is an iPod or not. I use the 6G iPod Classic mode myself. For more details read this article.
There is another option called DVD Decrypter. This program is nice because it doesn't decode the video on the DVD, just copies the MPEG2 file onto your hard drive. That way you don't loose any quality in the first step, but it isn't in the PMP friendly MPEG4 part 2 or H.264 format. You still have to use Videora to make it PMP friendly. The downside of this method is that you have very little control beyond choosing between MPEG4 and H.264 and the bitrate of you output file. I still recommend using FairUse Wizard with Videora.
Some of you out there may be Macintosh users. Most of these programs are for Windows, so they won't help you that much. My advice; buy copy of Windows and put it on your Mac. Ha ha, just kidding. You have it easy, just get Handbrake. It does the whole process from start to finish and is free. I don't know the feature set because I can't use it (I don't have a Mac) but I am sure somebody has written about it on the internet.
Now, what about this MPEG4 part 2 (usually just referred to as MPEG4) and H.264 (also called MPEG4 AVC or MPEG4 part 10) format stuff? MPEG2 is an older video format that is used on DVDs. Quality is good and is still used a lot, but the newer MPEG4 format creates smaller files of the same quality. When you are talking about a file that is between 700 MB and 1.5 GB this is significant. H.264 is a newer format still, with slightly better quality than MPEG4, though not as drastic as the difference between MPEG2 and MPEG4. The downside of H.264 is that it is very complex to decode, requiring the processor in the PMP to work harder. The harder the processor works the more electricity it requires, hurting your battery life. Think of it like dragging a weight on the ground. If you had to choose between a small but heavy object or a light but slightly larger object, which would you be able to drag farther?
There you go. Now go and put all your movies onto your PMP. Don't, however, share these files with others. That is illegal and amounts to stealing. I take no responsibility for your actions, just so you know.
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