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New iMac! DVD ripping question?

A

AppleLou

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 7, 2011
24
0
Got my new iMac on thursday and I love it.

It's the base end 21.5" and it's faster than anything i've ever owned before, hah.

But here's my question:

Is it possible to rip the DVD's I own onto my iMac and play them through iTunes without the disc?

I ask this because I own A LOT of dvd's and it would be more convenient to just have them all on the computer instead of having to constantly change discs when I want to watch a movie.

Thanks!
 
There's a program called Handbreak which is excellent for what you've described. I also have a program called RipIt, but I havent used it much.
 
mike.coulter said:
There's a program called Handbreak which is excellent for what you've described. I also have a program called RipIt, but I havent used it much.
Click to expand...

Awesome, thanks.

Another quick question;

Will the DVD retain full quality when I rip it? and how much space will it take up on my HDD per movie (average)?
 
Handbrake is very flexible. You can rip in as good of quality as you want. On average settings figure about 1.5Gig per movie. You will need VLC installed too. Google it.
 
Using Handbrake and a lot of time and patience, I have put my whole DVD collection of 500+ discs into iTunes. Then I access the library from my AppleTV. It's awesome! Totally worth the time and effort.

I use Handbrake's "High profile" preset, which gives the highest quality possible. A 2h movie at this setting lands at ~1.7 GB, which I'd say is pretty reasonable.
 
Vassius said:
Using Handbrake and a lot of time and patience, I have put my whole DVD collection of 500+ discs into iTunes. Then I access the library from my AppleTV. It's awesome! Totally worth the time and effort.

I use Handbrake's "High profile" preset, which gives the highest quality possible. A 2h movie at this setting lands at ~1.7 GB, which I'd say is pretty reasonable.
Click to expand...

How long would it take to rip a 2 hour movie on a 2011 3.1GHz Core i5?

Also, I noticed that most movies on iTunes are about 3.5 GB for the HD versions. How come the highest settings on HandBrake encode the movies at half the size? Is the quality not as good as iTunes?
 
Kendo said:
How long would it take to rip a 2 hour movie on a 2011 3.1GHz Core i5?

Also, I noticed that most movies on iTunes are about 3.5 GB for the HD versions. How come the highest settings on HandBrake encode the movies at half the size? Is the quality not as good as iTunes?
Click to expand...

I ripped Oh Brother, Where Art Thou. on the baseline iMac and it took 15-20 minutes.
 
Vassius said:
Using Handbrake and a lot of time and patience, I have put my whole DVD collection of 500+ discs into iTunes. Then I access the library from my AppleTV. It's awesome! Totally worth the time and effort.

I use Handbrake's "High profile" preset, which gives the highest quality possible. A 2h movie at this setting lands at ~1.7 GB, which I'd say is pretty reasonable.
Click to expand...

wow!! i DID NOT KNOW THIS. I planned on getting the 1TB +256 SSD If /i choose to store DVD movies and Tv Series season sets should I go to 2TB?
 
You can also rip it as a disc image, then open the VIDEO_TS folder in VLC. Why bother with lossy re-encoding?
 
Kendo said:
How long would it take to rip a 2 hour movie on a 2011 3.1GHz Core i5?

Also, I noticed that most movies on iTunes are about 3.5 GB for the HD versions. How come the highest settings on HandBrake encode the movies at half the size? Is the quality not as good as iTunes?
Click to expand...

DVDs are not HD.

DisMyMac said:
You can also rip it as a disc image, then open the VIDEO_TS folder in VLC. Why bother with lossy re-encoding?
Click to expand...

Space. Handbrake can take a 4.3GB movie down to as little as 700MB.
 
If you have lots of content (movies, music, etc.) it might be a better idea to keep it on external drives, if possible. You can get a 3TB external connected to the iMac for less than the 1TB to 2TB (~$150) upgrade cost. iTunes will see the content as though it is stored on the internal drive once you have it set up. And for a little more, you can use 2 (2TB) hard drives for a backup.
 
I have a dumb question to ask everyone then. Does anyone know how to rip a blu ray? I got a burner not to long ago but I cannot find a program to use.
 
horsekack said:
I have a dumb question to ask everyone then. Does anyone know how to rip a blu ray? I got a burner not to long ago but I cannot find a program to use.
Click to expand...

I'd like to know as well. Can it be done with an external Blu-ray burner with OS X or do you have to go through Windows?

I'd love to take advantage of that 27" screen with HD movies.
 
I plan on buying a LaCie Blu ray burner. I read that you can rip Blu ray through handbreak, but I question the source. Anyone here done it successfully?


I also had a question as to what settings do you recommend for high quality ripping for DVD's.
I set constant quality at RF 18 (some ppl say keep it at just 20 but I like to be safe). H.264 and 29.97 fps (mpeg 4 has a lightly less quality, but it is incredibly small). I don't mess with advanced settings atm.
I assume prologic II will be 5.1 compatible? And I use the highest bitrate.

Once it is ripped I change the file to MP4 and it works on my Sony USB connection.

Thx,
Alan
 
Vassius said:
Using Handbrake and a lot of time and patience, I have put my whole DVD collection of 500+ discs into iTunes. Then I access the library from my AppleTV. It's awesome! Totally worth the time and effort.

I use Handbrake's "High profile" preset, which gives the highest quality possible. A 2h movie at this setting lands at ~1.7 GB, which I'd say is pretty reasonable.
Click to expand...

How is your iTunes speed with that setup?

I've got about 100 movies in iTunes on my quad core windows machine with raid 0 drives and updating meta data in iTunes takes minutes per file now with all that data in there.

Ate you experiencing any of that?

If not them I need to figure out what I'm doing wrong...
 
theRick119 said:
How is your iTunes speed with that setup?

I've got about 100 movies in iTunes on my quad core windows machine with raid 0 drives and updating meta data in iTunes takes minutes per file now with all that data in there.

Ate you experiencing any of that?

If not them I need to figure out what I'm doing wrong...
Click to expand...

I have my iTunes library on an external FW disk, and I haven't noticed any performance issues regarding meta data. Even bulk changes on whole tv show seasons are pretty much instant.
 
yakkowarner epi said:
I plan on buying a LaCie Blu ray burner. I read that you can rip Blu ray through handbreak, but I question the source. Anyone here done it successfully?


I also had a question as to what settings do you recommend for high quality ripping for DVD's.
I set constant quality at RF 18 (some ppl say keep it at just 20 but I like to be safe). H.264 and 29.97 fps (mpeg 4 has a lightly less quality, but it is incredibly small). I don't mess with advanced settings atm.
I assume prologic II will be 5.1 compatible? And I use the highest bitrate.

Once it is ripped I change the file to MP4 and it works on my Sony USB connection.

Thx,
Alan
Click to expand...

I use the AppleTV 2 preset. The movies work on iPad, iPhone 4, and AppleTV 2.

I figure that the people who write handbrake and made the presets know the best settings that compromise qualty and size. Also, the AppleTV preset keeps the original Dolby Digital 5.1 sound file that the AppleTV 2 can playback. In addition to stereo prologic II that the iPad and iPhone need.

I think There is a Blu-ray ripping app called makemkv or something similar.
 
theRick119 said:
How is your iTunes speed with that setup?

I've got about 100 movies in iTunes on my quad core windows machine with raid 0 drives and updating meta data in iTunes takes minutes per file now with all that data in there.

Ate you experiencing any of that?

If not them I need to figure out what I'm doing wrong...
Click to expand...

What app are you using to update the metadata? iTunes?

IIRC, iTunes, in regards to videos files, will not update the actual video file but only the iTunes library file. That means if you start a fresh iTunes library/collection, you lose all of yourntagging except maybe the artwork.

Things might have changed but this is how it used to work.
 
If you feel adventurous...

If you're feeling up to a cool Mac challenge, take a look at the DVD Automator scripts available here. Once you do the initial program installations, it makes it quite simple to rip and encode bluerays and regular DVDs. I recently finished doing all 350 of my DVD movies and about 100 disks of TV seasons (Stargate SG-1 = Squeeee).

Edit: It does Bluerays too :D
 
Last edited:
yakkowarner epi said:
I plan on buying a LaCie Blu ray burner. I read that you can rip Blu ray through handbreak, but I question the source. Anyone here done it successfully?


I also had a question as to what settings do you recommend for high quality ripping for DVD's.
I set constant quality at RF 18 (some ppl say keep it at just 20 but I like to be safe). H.264 and 29.97 fps (mpeg 4 has a lightly less quality, but it is incredibly small). I don't mess with advanced settings atm.
I assume prologic II will be 5.1 compatible? And I use the highest bitrate.

Once it is ripped I change the file to MP4 and it works on my Sony USB connection.

Thx,
Alan
Click to expand...

Handbrake is not meant to be a disc ripper. It is meant for encoding and transcoding. Even the HB devs say this. It can rip discs, but I prefer to separate the workflow so I use makemkv (which works perfectly for BR discs) and then I use HB to encode the mkv files into an iTunes friendly container
 
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