Robservatory:
An ideal rip would be one that happens in seconds, saves into a 10KB file, and has quality matching the original. The reality, though, is far from the ideal. Ripping a movie involves making trade-offs between those three competing measures: Maximizing any one measure requires some sort of tradeoff with one or both of the other measures.
After ripping so many DVDs and Blu-rays over the years, I was curious about how HandBrake and Don Melton’s Video Transcoding tools handle those tradeoffs, so I decided to do some testing.
A friend of mine used to be the “encoding Guy” at Apple back in the early days of the iTunes store. He described encoding as “a Black Art. You don’t have to kill a goat at midnight under a full moon to get it right but it helps”. Griffiths does a good job at explaining what happens when you encode, why it happens and what to expect, quality and file size wise.
I have tried repeatedly to grok Handbrake’s UI, and failed every time. It appears to have been designed by monkeys on LSD. On windows, thankfully there is Vidcoder, which has a far, far more comprehensible UI. Right now I spend time in both Windows and Mac OS. One of my biggest reasons for continuing to run Windows occasionally is so I can run vidcoder and avoid using Handbrake for ripping DVDs and creating SD versions of HD videos.
THANK YOU!
Rob Griffiths is one of the handful of Macworld alumni who continue to provide value for one’s attention.
You’re welcome. Be aware that vidcoder has recently gone 64 bit only. If you are going to run it on a machine with 2gb of RAM (ie, a VM), get 1.5.34, which seems to be the most recent version that works properly on a 2gb X86 install of Win7.
Also, FYI, Vidcoder uses handbrake as its encoding engine, so it’s the same under the hood and tutorials on achieving the best results with Handbrake can be used to determine the best settings for Vidcoder.
I have to admit that my encodes haven’t been as good since I ran out of goats.
Apple has pretty much nailed iTunes movies. I brought one into Quicktime and figured out what bitrates Apple uses and just used those settings in Handbrake.