Doing this is a bit of a gray area, legally. I’m pretty sure it hasn’t been deemed “illegal” but it also hasn’t been deemed “legal”. Just an FYI.
So lets say you’re a movie buff with a wall to wall bookshelf filled with DVDs.. or even a movie wimp with just a few DVDs. Either way, they take up space. Space that could be put to better use by things like… Action Figures, Blenders, Elephant Statues or pretty much anything else.
HandBrake First Page
First thing’s first: Go get the software!
You can find it here: http://handbrake.fr/downloads.php
I absolutely love Handbrake. It’s made it extremely easy to back up your dvds. You’ll also need VLC in order to back up DVDs with encryption. You can download it here: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/. Once you get everything installed, you should end up with something like the picture.
Select your dvd from the list. It should take a few minutes and say “Scanning Source” up at the top. When it’s done, it should automatically pick the longest title (which is usually the movie) but I always double-check it against the length printed on the dvd box. Keep in mind that the one in the title length is fairly exact and the one on the box is usually rounded to the nearest minute.
Next you’ll want to go over to the right panel and select your output type. You can pick a variety of devices and output formats, I usually use Apple Universal because it encodes the movie as an MP4 at a pretty decent quality so I can pull it straight into iTunes and watch it whenever/wherever I please. Also, if you’re an audiophile like I am, you may want to go over to the Audio tab and change the bit rate from 160 to 320kbps.
After that, the long part begins. Click the start button at the top. It will take a few hours to convert the movie over (usually about twice as long as the movie, for me). After that, navigate to the output folder (Desktop by default) and you should see your movie. Normally it has a really awful name like “NAME_OF_MOVIE_2347.mp4″ so I usually change it to something I can work with and then import it to iTunes. From there, I go on Google Images and find a High Resolution picture of the DVD art or Movie poster.
Congrats, now you’re free to box up all those shelves of DVDs and watch them off of your hard drive. In fact, I was able to take about 5 shelves of DVDs and replaced it with a terabyte external hard drive. The only real downside to this is that it takes forever to do and you have to have some kind of set top box or computer attached to your TV to watch them. We’ll cover how to pull them in on Xbox 360’s, PS3’s and more later.
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