Ripping a DVD and converting it for the iPod

Since, as you may have read, I'm now a happy iPod Touch owner and this device has such great video capabilities (huge bright screen + support for advanced codecs with high compression rates), I decided to rip parts of my video library, converting them to the MP4 format, and load them on the iPod.

One of the best programs for this purpose is Handbrake: it's an open-source DVD converter based on common GPL video codecs and libraries.

Handbrake can take a variety of video sources as input: video files, VIDEO_TS folders or a DVD drive. In this case, Handbrake will read the video data directly from my DVD of "Arriving Somewhere" by Porcupine Tree (best live show ever, by the way ):

The presets Handbrake comes with usually work quite well. The only important settings I usually change are the following.

Picture size

Handbrake will automatically determine how the video needs to be cropped in order to remove black bars around the image, but you should manually define the size format of the target file. Based on the aspect ratio of the original video, set the width to 480 pixels (for a video in 16:9 format) or the height to 320 (for a standard 4:3 video). Then set the other value accordingly, maintaining the original aspect ratio.

For instance, the source video of "Arriving Somewhere" is 720x480 pixels and Handbrake determines that it will crop 2 pixel rows on the top. This gives us a video source of 720x478 pixels. Since the format is almost 16:9, I'll set the target width to 480 and the height to 318, maintaining the original aspect ratio of the video as closely as possible.

Deinterlacing

Usually video on DVDs is interlaced, while the iPod reads progressive video frames. In order to remove interlacing artefacts, you should always set the "Deinterlace" option to "on". Deinterlacing an already deinterlaced video doesn't degrade the quality of the video much, therefore even if you're wrong the final video will be clean.

Video codec

I'd suggest you make full use of the capabilities of your iPod and use the H.264 codec for your videos, which should provide for the best quality / size ratios (Update: I'm wrong, the H.264 videos Handbrake spits out are not compatible with the iPod. Select the MPEG4-FFmpeg codec instead!). If you aren't in a hurry, selecting "2-pass encoding" may allow you to risk lower bitrates than usual without noticable picture quality loss.

For videos in iPod size I usually use a bitrate between 300 and 400 kbps. You can safely lower this value to 300 if you use 2-pass encoding. If you don't mind video quality at all or the video has very little motion, 200 kbps can be sufficient.

Audio & Subtitles

The default audio codec used by Handbrake is AAC which works great even with very low bitrates. As usual, it depends on how sensible you are to compression artefacts: for "Arriving Somewhere" I used a bitrate of 128 kbps, while for speech-only videos you can go much lower (48-64). If you are going to listen to your videos on simple headphones, select the "stereo" mixdown in the menu.

At last, you can also embed any subtitles of the DVD in the final video. This is incredibly useful for non native english speakers: for instance, watching shows from Eddie Izzard's live show box set without subtitles tends to be quite difficult for me.

Well, that's about it. You should be able to encode the favorite clips from your DVDs in no time and be able to carry them around as much as you want.

And since I mentioned Eddie Izzard, here's one of his most hilarious clips (with a Lego animation)!

...and now go get his live show set MMVI!