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April 25, 2007...4:24 pm
Mac DVD Ripping How To: Handbrake, MediaFork & Anamorphic Widescreen
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31 Comments
April 25, 2007 at 5:41 pm
I’m glad you enjoy it
Great review, most in-depth one I’ve seen yet.
Here are a few very minor nitpicks:
1) Preview images aren’t new, they’ve always been there.
2) You don’t need QuickTime Pro; HandBrake does not use QuickTime at all.
3) As explained in our documentation, you do *not* want to turn deinterlacing on all the time. It drastically reduces picture quality on most DVDs, especially of films, because those usually aren’t interlaced.
4) HB isn’t donationware, it’s open source. In fact, we have a standing policy of refusing *all* donations.
5) The presets also include some extra h.264 settings, that improve quality. When you check on 2-pass, you’re losing them. See this forum thread for a temporary solution until we get this fixed: http://handbrake.m0k.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1238
April 25, 2007 at 5:55 pm
Thanks for the positive review!
I would like to offer one correction, though: HandBrake is not donationware. In fact, we don’t accept donations from users, period.
April 25, 2007 at 5:57 pm
Oh, and, actually… you do not need QuickTime Pro to get H.264 encoding. We use the x264 library to provide H.264 encoding.
April 26, 2007 at 1:52 am
Thanks for the corrections – I’ll update – thanks!
April 26, 2007 at 3:47 am
[...] Mac DVD Ripping How To: Handbrake, MediaFork & Anamorphic Widescreen [...]
April 26, 2007 at 5:32 am
[...] Mac DVD Ripping How To: Handbrake, MediaFork & Anamorphic Widescreen « TWO A DAY (tags: AppleTV DVD mp4 h264) [...]
April 26, 2007 at 3:02 pm
Brilliant!! Thanks for such an in-depth review — I am going to try it out over the weekend.
Cheers!
April 26, 2007 at 3:22 pm
Thank you
May 5, 2007 at 2:43 am
Very good in-depth article. I’ve found handbrake to be simple to use as well. I love open source!
May 23, 2007 at 4:58 pm
[...] Our original guide to using Handbrake to rip/convert DVD’s to Quicktime is here. [...]
June 3, 2007 at 5:15 pm
[...] have to spell it out for you? Instead of putting in DVD’s one by one, why don’t you get Handbrake, rip the DVD’s onto your HDD and then stream via AppleTV? Hello, 21 [...]
June 13, 2007 at 5:05 pm
[...] Note: VOB files from most retail DVD’s cannot be opened directly in MPEG Streamclip. You have two choices, you can use Handbrake to convert protected VOB to Mp4 or you can use Mac the Ripper to “unprotected” a VOB file and then you can open it in MPEG Streamclip to convert to another format. Our tutorial is here. [...]
July 18, 2007 at 12:59 pm
[...] (Our How To). [...]
July 19, 2007 at 2:07 pm
the downside of handbrake is that you will lose vital content from the source dvd when converting.
handbrake doesbt support closed captioning – which is MUCH more legible than subtitles.
subtitles are burned-in to the video track, not sync’d up separately, so you have no choice about displaying them.
no more than 1 aux audio track can be captured – so you are forced to chose whether you want to throw out the director’s commentary or the the dub in your own language or the soundtrack etc etc!
no more than 1 subtitle language can be selected – this is a KILLER for second language learners who want to mix & match the original/adapted written & spoken languages.
You wont get much joy from the devs at handbrake about this issue – they have just as much contempt as the folks at mactheripper (’MTR’) regarding data integrity (they call it a “fringe” issue).
It would be nice if handbrake at least offered a work-around where they output all the auxiliary
content as separate files, if they cant figure out how to add (more) multiple tracks to an mp4 or a MOV container (obviously control/selection during playback is an issue: only mpeg2 players like dvdplayer or VLC have explicit concepts of aux tracks … even though mpeg4 is based on the quicktime MOV file format! and even though mpeg4 has much more sophisticated facilities for rich data types!)
Basically, your only choice is to duplicate your work at the begining with MTR: one simple pass to decrypt the vobs; and another pass to demux the vobs so that you have discrete files for the audio subtracks & the subtitles …. you will have to skip handbrake, and manually add them into the resulting mpeg4 file with quicktimepro or whatever (assuming that you can figure out a way to rasterize the subtitles…. or OCR them so that they can be used as CC).
NOTE: mtr will _NOT_ work on TS files once they are on your drive; mtr will work only on physical dvd itself. So once the first rip is done you can not go back & re-reip again in order to extract (demux) all these extra goodies. In other words, you still need to keep your original dvd collection FOEVER until this problem is solved (you cant go & sell your dvd collection, thinking that you still have all the ‘raw’ data backed up).
sigh.
what a mess.
(METROXING: The point of Handbrake is to convert from VOB to MP4 – if you want the entire disc, use MAC THE RIPPER. Our comprehensive answer guide is here).
August 31, 2007 at 12:19 pm
[...] previous posts on Handbrake, & MPEG [...]
November 13, 2007 at 12:49 pm
just see it
December 12, 2007 at 5:01 pm
Thank you! nice in-depth review!
January 17, 2008 at 6:52 pm
[…]Thanks for this tutorial.[…]
January 29, 2008 at 5:20 am
Interesting article. Thanks for the information.
February 24, 2008 at 11:03 am
Nice post.
Thanks!
April 7, 2008 at 1:11 pm
[...] its best resolution, I’d still advise using Handbrake as it creates a much crisper file. (Our HT and subsequent Handbrake, MPEG Streamclip & El Gato Turbo Stick tips & reviews). But if you [...]
April 21, 2008 at 6:09 am
Nice post. Helped a lot.
Thanks
April 24, 2008 at 1:32 am
its a shame that you forgot to mention that when you use Handbrake and use the mp4 codec, the 5.1 surround sound on the disc is downmixed to 2-channel stereo.
dont know about you but sound is as important as the image to me.
for the ps3, at least, there is another way of transcoding dvd’s into a format that contains full dolby digitial and a great image quality.
May 25, 2008 at 2:26 pm
thanks, very interesting
May 28, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Nice post!
June 1, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Thats real working, thanks!
June 23, 2008 at 3:20 am
It drastically reduces picture quality on most DVDs, especially of films, because those usually aren’t interlaced.
July 3, 2008 at 7:09 am
Thanks!!!
August 1, 2008 at 10:53 am
Oooo yeaaah:)very clever of you to write such post!brilliant!!thanks alot:))and its true indeed taht the 5.1 surround sound on the disc is downmixed to 2-channel stereo. Other information is important too:))thanks!
August 15, 2008 at 3:53 am
Hi.
Interesting article.
Thank you
And how to subscribe to RSS?
August 29, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Very good!
Thanks!