Inverse Karma

With portable memory becoming cheaper everyday, more and more devices are pushing the memory capacity to unprecedented levels. The ubiquitous iPod comes with a mammoth 160GB space (the Classic version). Even your mobile phone could take up to 4GB or 8GB SD memory cards. So what do you do with all that storage space lying around?

Requirements

With this tutorial, I’m gonna show you how to rip movies from DVDs and convert videos (any imaginable format!) for the iPhone, iPod and in fact any mobile device that supports playing videos. But before that, here’s the list of things you’re gonna need.

• HandBrake (download link below)
• Knowledge of your device’s screen resolution (you can find that from the manual)
• Patience!

Download HandBrake
Latest Stable Version: 0.9.4 (4.66 MB)

Let it rip!

Start up HandBrake after completing installation. Before beginning, go to Options and under the Pictures tab, make sure the path to VLC is correct. Don’t worry if you don’t have VLC installed, this is used only for the preview feature. Now move to the CLI tab and set the number of processor cores to Automatic. Now we are ready to rip our videos.

Choose the source file or DVD. Now click on the iPhone & iPod Touch preset on the right-hand panel. But what if you’re converting the video for your mobile phone? Don’t worry, the preset is only a starting point – we can tailor our video to our needs – in fact, the only settings you need to change are the Width and Height values under the Picture tab, based on the screen resolution of your device. That is all! Click on the Start button to begin encoding your output video.

Experimenting with the settings

If you like tweaking every possible setting to extract more juice from your software (like me!), HandBrake was a great choice. It has a ton of options (though most of them require a Ph.D. in video processing techniques to figure out) that you can experiment with to change the quality and file size of your output video.

Video: Select the Video tab. Under quality, choose Target Size and set a file size. HandBrake will adjust the other settings to make sure the final output’s size matches with it. Average Bitrate is the reverse of the previous option, attempting to achieve the quality you choose. Remember that bitrate translates to quality. Choose values between 500kbps to 1500kbps, as many devices cannot handle very high bitrates.

Audio: The Audio tab too offers you an option to change the Audio bitrate. Once again, experiment with the bitrate until you hit a sweet spot between good quality and low file size.

Screenshot Guide

Didn’t work?

If it didn’t play on your mobile phone, chances are it doesn’t support the H.264 video codec. Try changing it to MPEG-4 and encode again. If it still doesn’t work, you could try Avidemux, which offers a large number of video codecs and even options for editing your video. It is good practice to get information beforehand about the video formats your device supports so that it helps you in choosing between HandBrake and Avidemux.

Welcome back amigo! Check out the homepage for latest posts or the archives for older posts.

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