Every Flavour Beans

HandBrake is the easiest to use DVD to iPod converter application that does the job in one simple step. It’s an actively developed, well supported GPL’ed application and is available for Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux platforms, in GUI and command line forms. The GUI version has good user interface, is stable and supports conversions to MPEG as well as XviD format. Refer its website to see the long list of features it supports. It is one of my most favourite media conversion applications.

1. Download and install HandBrake from its website. The procedure below is for the PC version; a very easy to follow procedure for the Mac version is available here. After the installation is complete, run HandBrake from the Start menu, the main window looks like this.
   
2. In the “Source” panel, select the folder where the ripped DVD files are stored by clicking the “Browse” button. HandBrake parses the selected DVD folder and fills the “DVD Title” drop-down box with all the available titles. Select the title you want to convert to iPod format.
   
   If it’s a movie DVD, the longest title should be the main movie.
   
3. Select a folder where the converted video files should be stored by clicking the “Browse” button in the “Destination” panel. The two drop-down boxes allow the video and audio encoder to be specified. To convert to the iPod format, select the following settings:
   Video: H.264(iPod)
   Audio: ACC
   Width x Height: 320 x 240 (you can select any resolution supported by your iPod here)
   
   As noted earlier, HandBrake can be used to convert DVD format to non-iPod formats too.
   

The basic configuration is finished now. The many tabs available in the lower part of the window can be used for more fine tuning of the settings.
In the “Picture Settings” tab, select any subtitle if you want and also set any crop settings if required(”Auto Crop” should work fine in most cases).

Now go to the “Video Settings” tab and enter a value preferably greater than 400 as the video bitrate. I usually select a bitrate around 700kbps but for iPod a lesser bitrate will also do fine. Higher bitrates result in larger output files, but with relatively higher output quality. 2-pass encoding takes longer time to get the conversion done but results in better output quality without any increase in the size.

Similarly modify the settings in the other tabs too, but the defaults should be fine if you don’t have specific requirements.

4. When ready, either click the button “Encode Video” to immediately start the encoding process or click the button “Add to Queue” if you want to create more conversion jobs by repeating the above steps and add all of them to a job queue and process them together.
   
5. If you are happy with the quality of the output video file you get using the above entered settings, you can save this profile under a name to use it with later projects by going to File->Save Profile or by pressing Ctrl-S. To later open a saved profile, use File->Open Profile or press Ctrl-O.
   
6. You can also select one of the available preset configuration profiles iPod, Apple TV, PS3 etc from the “Presets” menu.
   

HandBrake also has a command-line version for windows. It also supports conversion to XviD and other formats. All in all, it is one of the most diverse conversion tools available today.