copying DVD's

[AlexQQQ]

hi-
I am hoping to copy movie DVD's to my hard drive, so I can watch my dvd's on trips without the discs.

Saw some posts about handbrake and mac the ripper (not really sure what the difference is). Anyways about to download handbrake...but it has 3 versions, a 32 bit and 64 bit. Does it matter which version I pick? (I have a 2010 macbook pro 13).

Also do I need to download a VLC media player. Or does mac have all the media player needed to view whatever video fomat?

Thanks.

Alex

 

[spinnerlys]

As this is asked every other day or so, and MRoogle seems to be not widely known to newcomers on this board to find many of the already exisiting threads about this issue, I present you a small guide on how to "copy" video DVDs.

1. How to copy (rip) the content of video DVDs to your HDD​

As commercial video DVDs use a copy protection scheme called CSS (Content Scramble System), additional software is needed to copy the content of a video DVD to your HDD, which is called "ripping". There are several applications to accomplish this.​

1.1. MacTheRipper 2.6.6 (free)

Insert the video DVD into your DVD drive and open MacTheRipper and click the GO button, after which you can select the place you want the video DVD's content saved to.
As this version of MTR is quite old, it will not read many modern DVDs.​

1.2. RipIt (19.95 USD, trial with 10 rips free)

Insert the video DVD and press the RIP button.​

1.3. Fairmount (free)​

1.4. Mac DVDRipper Pro (9.95 USD)

Insert the video DVD and select a destination folder, then press the RIP button.​

2. How to transcode the MPEG-2 encoded video DVD material for use on your computer after you ripped the video DVD.​

As video DVDs take up a lot of space (up to 8GB), one can transcode (changing the format and encoding) the MPEG-2 encoded video into MPEG-4 encoded video via Handbrake (not Handbreak), which might only take 1GB of HDD capacity away, while still looking good.

Handbrake currently offers to read VIDEO_TS folders, the folder on the video DVD with all the material (menus, video and audio) inside, and transcode the footage to something smaller. Currently variants of the space efficient and highly qualitative MPEG-4 codec are used, H264 or Xvid for example.
The current version of Handbrake offers two container formats, .mkv and .mp4, older versions also had the .avi container to transcode to.
.mkv and .mp4 containers accept the H264 codec, also used for the QuickTime trailers on Apple's Trailer page.
Handbrake also offers PRESETS for you to choose from. There are for the AppleTV, iPhone and iPod Touch, iPod and some more.

For more information about properly using Handbrake, either go to the Handbrake Community, read the Handbrake Guide or use MRoogle to find dozens upon dozens of threads about this.​

3. How to transcode the MPEG-2 encoded video DVD material for use on your computer without ripping the video DVD.​

If you don't want to rip the video DVDs first, and just use Handbrake fro Transcoding the video, make sure to install VLC Player to circumvent the CSS we talked earlier about.
But as Handbrake is 64-bit and VLC is 32-bit, you need to download Handbrake in 32-bit too.

VLC Player 32-bit (VLC 1.0.5)
Handbrake 64-bit Intel, 32-bit Intel and 32-bit PPC on this page, so choose the right one
​

from How to backup/copy/rip video DVDs to your HDD and transcode them to another format.

VLC is able to play most formats out there, many of them can't be played by QuickTime Player, even though Perian can be used to enable playback of some formats via QT.



Mac OS X Basics

Also have a look at the following links, as the information presented there might be helpful in your future endeavours into Mac OS X and could clear up initial confusion and may even prevent harm to your system or your files.

Switch 101 - guide with articles made by Apple on how to accustom yourself, after you switched to Mac OS X from Windows​

Mac 101 - How to get started with Mac OS X​

Find out how - tutorial videos made by Apple on how to do certain thing in Mac OS X​

Pro tips - tips made available by Apple for easier ways of doing certain tasks​

Mac OS X Keyboard Shortcuts - Learn about common Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts.​

Mac OS X Beginner's Guide by MacRumors - learn about software, media players, shortcuts and some useful tips, tricks and hints​

Mac Guides - tutorials, product guides and more​

Mac Guides - Finding Mac Software​

MRoogle - a very effective tool to search these fora using Google and made available by edesignuk, introductory threads: 1, 2 and 3​

"How to maximise your MacRumors troubleshooting experience" created by mad jew in 2006​