Saturday, April 29, 2006

HandBrake and ffmpegX are essential Mac OS X DVD & video file tools

HandBrake is all you need to take a movie on DVD and rip it to your OS X Mac, just like you use iTunes to rip a music CD.

I repeat, HandBrake is all you need to take a movie that's on DVD and rip it to your OS X Mac, just like you use iTunes to rip a music CD.

If and only if you need to convert some other random video format (Xvid or some random .avi files for instance) to something your Mac can play, then ffmpegX is what you need. Rather geeky interface but if you just select from the presets menu, things will be easy as 1-2-3.

The ffmpegX installation is a 3-parter, you have to download - from provided URLs - some zip files (open-source conversion source libraries) and then point the installer to the files you downloaded. Just read the install screen and you'll be fine.

You can also trivially use these applications to get your video, whether downloaded or ripped from DVD, into a format suitable for use with a Sony PSP (my portable entertainment center of choice at the moment) or a video-capable iPod, or the like. The documentation/howto links on their respective sites do a good job explaining what to do. And it is easy, really.

Documentation links:
The quickest handbrake walkthrough you could want.

Other HandBrake documentation for more specific topics.

Extensive collection of ffmpegX howtos - anything you want to do with ffmpegX, there's a howto document for it.

Enjoy...

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