Mac OS X is a wonder. When it comes to personal information management, entertainment and the Internet, it’s got all the basics covered. Beyond that, there are a handful of “essential” apps most Mac owners install on a new machine within minutes of booting it up for the first time. Handbrake is undoubtedly one of those essentials. And it just got a serious new upgrade.

Handbrake is a very handy (pun intended) DVD-ripping utility that converts DVDs to self-contained video files that can be played back on a computer or mobile device. (Contrary to the outright lies of major motion picture studios, there’s nothing wrong with having digital backups of movies you already own). In addition, DVDs can be converted into a number of formats, resolutions and aspect ratios. For many years, it has served as the single easiest way to get my movies off-of DVD discs and onto my iPods, iPhones and even my PSP.

The latest release, Handbrake 0.9.4, includes support for Snow Leopard, and is also available in 64-bit editions for both Leopard and Snow Leopard. It also adds the ability to include multiple subtitle tracks to exported video and a new “live preview” for viewing the likely outcome of an export before committing to a lengthy rip.

According to the release notes on the Handbrake website, the latest version includes new features like “macroblock tree rate control” and “weighted P-Frame prediction.” I’ve absolutely no idea what any of that means, and although they do provide links to explanatory articles, it made my head swim. I’ll just assume it’s all very swish and futuristic and good for my rips.

The introduction of a 64-bit version is good news for those of us using true 64-bit multi-core processors, though the performance increase is a fairly modest 10 percent. The software also supports non-DVD encoding, which is great news for those of us who do a lot of video editing. (I prefer to use Final Cut but often have to import raw data into iMovie only to export it out to a format Final Cut will accept. Handbrake won’t cut out this extra conversion step, but it performs far faster than the monolith that is iMovie and provides more flexibility in export formats.)

It’s not all about video, either. Handbrake offers great audio encoding options, including the newly-added ability to encode AAC using OS X’s Core Audio (which means far higher quality than was possible previously).

Of course, there are a lot of other software titles that offer similar functionality (Aimersoft’s popular DVD Ripper, for instance) but Handbrake is free. Although this means it has no official support, it does enjoy an active and enthusiastic user community so if you get stuck you won’t have far to go to find answers and help.

If you are using a 64 bit machine and want to get the full 64-bit goodness from Handbrake, you’ll need the 64-bit version of VLC Player, the latest nightly builds of which can be found here. (Please note that VLC Player 64-bit is beta software and as such offers no end-user support.) Handbrake 0.9.4 is available from the Handbrake website now.

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The video encoding and transcoding tool, Handbrake has been updated to 0.9.3. This latest release brings a number of substantial changes to this excellent video utility.

The two most fundamental changes make Handbrake more flexible and also more limited. First flexibility — Handbrake will now accept many different video sources and does far more than just DVDs. The second change is that DVD decrypting has been completely decoupled from Handbrake and you’ll need another app to do perform that step in the conversion process. This version has a number of other improvements for Mac, Apple TV, and iPod users. Read the release notes to get a full list of changes.

Video Cornucopia

Just in time to help us deal with our grief at the passing of Techspansion and its seminal video converter, Visual Hub, Handbrake now has the ability to convert all sorts of different source material to H.264 or MPEG4 video. This potentially allows Handbrake to transcode AVI video from digital cameras and other such files. This new flexibility comes as a benefit of incorporating the libavcodec and libavformat libraries from the FFmpeg project. Unfortunately, the AVI file from a Canon P&S camera I used to test this on resulted in great looking video with a bunch of static in the audio track.

DVD Decryption Decoupled

For reasons that perhaps only the developers fully understand, Handbrake no longer includes the libraries required to decrypt commercial DVD’s. We Mac users are fortunate in that Handbrake will dynamically use VLC to decrypt a DVD if the app is present in your Applications folder. Just install VLC as you would normally and then anything that can be played with VLC can be read by Handbrake. If you want, you can also use something like RipIt, DVD2OneX, or Mac The Ripper 3 to decrypt DVD’s and place a copy on your hard drive. Personally, I’ve found RipIt.app does exactly what I want (makes a copy of the full DVD to the hard drive) and is dead simple to use. It costs $19, but it is simpler than the convoluted MTR donationware process (join the forums at ripdifferent.com to get the details), and cheaper than D2OX.

Other Benefits for Apple Fans

Besides the built-in VLC integration (a Mac exclusive), Apple users also get a number of improvements to the Mac GUI like better organization of presets, a better queue (that is saved between sessions or in case of a crash), reading from ZFS volumes, and more. Many of the presets have been redone as well to take advantage of the updates to the underlying encoding libraries. The new Apple TV preset is great at constant quality and supports Dobly Digital for Apple TV files directly (that still work with Apple TV 2.3). If you are really interested in tweaking the Apple TV preset to get transparent standard definition DVD, you’ll want to hang out in this thread at the Handbrake forums. The iPod and Universal presets have been updated as well. Be sure to “Update Built-in Presets” from the Presets menu when running the app to make sure you have latest settings.

Summary

I have been using the development snapshots for a while now and the improvements in video quality are great. I am really glad to see the changes move into the standard release. Taking out DVD decryption is not a huge deal because there are other alternatives for the Mac. And adding the ability to work with a wider variety of video formats is particularly welcome now that Visual Hub is no longer being developed. I will post follow-up comments if I figure out what caused my issues with my AVI video file. Let us know about your experiences with Handbrake 0.9.3.

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Liberate Your Memories

Just like those pictures that I maybe wouldn’t take the time to look through otherwise, I’ve decided to start converting some of our home movies to play on the Apple TV. One of the big problems with the movie footage we have on tapes or in iMovie is that we never watch it. Getting our home movies on to the Apple TV means that we actually get to enjoy reliving some of those memories together.

The first step is to get the video into a format that will play on the Apple TV. If your home movies are in iMovie, then it’s a simple matter to export or share to iTunes. I would recommend VisualHub, but Techspansion shuttered their doors just earlier this week (literally, the day I started to write this post — I’m still not over it). If your movies are already on DVD, Handbrake will convert them for you. Also, the latest development snapshot of Handbrake will accept multiple file formats (not just DVD) for input so it can take the place of VisualHub in many cases. Targeting Apple TV is a matter of selecting the appropriate preset and clicking start. MPEG Streamclip is another tool that can help convert video from one format to another. QuickTime Pro also has some limited options for converting video.

Once you have video in the correct format, you just need to provide some extra information about your videos so that iTunes can properly identify them to your Apple TV.

Tagging the Past

One of the keys to get full enjoyment out of my Apple TV is the killer program MetaX. This little gem allows you to set and manipulate all the meta-data for iTunes media files including cover art. What I do (and this is the really clever part) is to set all my movies as episodes of a TV Show named “Home Movies.”

What’s cool about this is that all my Home Movies appear together in the Apple TV menus under TV Shows : Home Movies. I can further organize them by year (using “Season”) and I can write down who appears in the movie in the “Artist” and “Actors” sections. “Description” and “Date” are obvious and make browsing the movies on the Apple TV convenient. MetaX also allows you to grab a frame from the video and set that as the cover art for your home movie as well. MetaX is donationware, free to download and use, but please consider donating something via PayPal.

Personal Media Bliss

So now I have all these home movies that otherwise would never have seen the light of a display all organized in iTunes and synced to my Apple TV. They are all together, sorted by date, include information about what’s happening and who’s in the movie, and display a frame (that I picked) to represent the cover art. Most importantly, all those old home movies are finally being watched and enjoyed, which I’m pretty sure is what we all had in mind when we filmed the event in the first place.

Good luck with liberating your own memories and media files. If you have any other ideas, particularly for tagging, please share your tips and tricks in the comments.

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Digital

Handbrake is the go to source for creating digital copies of your video. With Handbrake you can pop in a DVD and select the appropriate preset. You can encode straight to iPod, iPhone or Apple TV. Handbrake is open source, and completely free.

iSquint is great for converting DivX/XviD to Mp4. It’s freeware for basic use, or you can purchase Visual Hub which offers a variety of services. For basic use, iSquint works well and converts fairly quickly. For the best iPod TV out settings, select:

• Check Optimize for TV
• Check H.264
• Scale the slider to the quality setting of your choice

Quick tip for your iPods. If you want to import a video without transferring it to iTunes. Be sure your iPod is set to “Manually Manage” and you can now drag and drop files right onto the iPod icon in iTunes and transfer straight to it.

Physical

MacTheRipper allows you to import DVD Vob files right to your Hard Drive. Couple it with Dvd2OneX and you can shrink the file down to 4.4 gigs so it will fit right on a single layer DVD-R. Personally, if you can find it, I prefer the original version of Dvd2OneX, not the new Dvd2OneX2. Also Dvd2One isn’t freeware and requires purchasing.

Toast 8 will take your Dvd2One or MacTheRipper file and burn it for playback on DVD players. Toast 8 is not freeware and will require purchasing to unlock all its features. Be sure to select UDF in Toast 8 to ensure proper playback.

iTunes
When dealing with importing videos into iTunes, it’s a simple drag and drop. If the video you copy doesn’t go into the proper category (Movie, TV Show, etc) be sure to edit the Metadata as follows:

• Right click and select ‘Get Info’
• Click the ‘Video’ tab
• From the drop down select: TV Show, Movie, or Music Video

Comment any questions, I’ll see if I can answer them. Also if you use any other resources or methods for converting your videos, I’d love to hear about them.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended for any illegal activity. What you do with it is your problem.

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