How do I put Movies on my iPod/iPhone

Let me first start by stressing that I am in no way advocating piracy of DVD’s.  I feel strongly that you should purchase any music or movie that you use personally.  I do think, however, that if I’ve purchased a CD or a DVD that I should be able to view it in whatever format on whatever device I choose.

That aside, I spent several hours trying to figure out how I could easily copy a DVD to my ipod.I have only owned my Nano for  a short period of time and before now have converted movies to WMV format for playback on my PocketPC and SmartPhone.  Since I’m now carrying my Nano around everywhere, and it has more storage than my other devices, I decided I should transition to the Nano as my personal video player.

After much searching on the internet, I settled on an approach that works quite well and doesn’t require that I know anything about the low level settings of the converted video.  It took a long time to figure out how I to copy a DVD to my ipod, so I thought I would share it.  Hopefully the next person who is trying to figure out how to copy a dvd to an ipod will find this useful.

To begin, you need to download and install two pieces of free software on your machine.  You will need a copy of DVD43, which you can download from here.  I am using DVD43 version 4.3.1.  Second, you will need a copy of HandBrake for the video conversion, which you can download from here.

Begin by installing the DVD43 application.

First, locate the download installation file in your file explorer and run it.  My installation file appeared as follows:

Run this file.  The first screen presented by the installer appears as follows:

 

Click Next to start the installation.

The next screen presented by the installer appears as follows:

 

 If you don’t want desktop icons or quick-launch icons, uncheck the boxes accordingly.  Click Next.  The installation will show a progress bar as it installs the DVD43 Software.  The installation is so quick that I was unable to capture a screen-shot of this progress indicator.  When complete, you are presented a DVD43 Information screen as shown below:

Review the informaiton and click Next.  The final installation screen will prompt for a re-boot or a wait until next re-boot as shown below:

 

Once your system has been restarted, the DVD43 application will automatically scan your DVD drive on startup and whenever a DVD is inserted.  The DVD43 application appears as an icon in the task tray as shown below:

 

When no DVD is in the drive, the Icon is shown as above as a Yellow Face.  When a DVD is inserted, if DVD43 can successfully unlock the DVD for reading, the Icon changes to a Green Smiley Face.

DVD43 is an impressive piece of software that allows the video conversion software to read the DVD content directly from the DVD disk in the DVD drive.  This is a huge time saver as most of the other approaches I found (excluding commercially available packages) require that you first decrypt the DVD from the DVD disk to a huge VOB file on your hard drive.  DVD43 eliminates this step and the time involved so you can convert to the required format straight from the DVD disk.

Once you have DVD43 installed, you need to install HandBrake in order to perform the actual video conversion into the H.264 format used by the iPod/iPhone.

First, locate the HandBrake installation file from within your file explorer.  I am using HandBrake version 0.9.2.  My installation file appeared as follows:

 

Run this file to start the installation.  The first install screen will appear as shown below:

 

Click Next.  The next installation screen is as follows:

 

Review the license agreement and agree it by clicking ‘I Agree’.  The installation will prompt for the installation location as shown below:

 

Fill in the location where you want HandBrake to be installed and click ‘Install’.  The final installation screen allows you to run the HandBrake application after it is installed as shown below:

Uncheck the Run Handbrake 0.9.2 option if you do not wish to execute the Handbrake application immediately and click ‘Finish’.

Now that you have everything installed, you can convert a DVD for import into iTunes and loading onto your iPod/iPhone.   Below is the process I use when converting a DVD for my 3rd generation Nano.

First, I start with the Handbrake application not running, but with DVD43 running (it starts when my machine starts).  The DVD43 task-tray Icon is the Yellow Face.

I insert a DVD into my DVD drive and DVD43 attempts to decrypt it.  Once decrypted, the DVD43 task-tray Icon changes to a Green Smiley Face indicating the DVD has been successfully decrypted.  I now know that Handbrake can read the files from the DVD for conversion.

Now I start up Handbrake for the conversion.  The Handbrake interface is shown below:

 

 To convert the DVD, Click the ‘Browse’ button in the ‘Source’ input panel on the main Handbrake screen and select the main DVD file from the DVD Drive contents.

Next, click ‘Browse’ in the ‘Destination’ input panel on the main Handbrake screen and select the hard drive location where you want the output video file to be placed. 

Click on the appropriate ‘Preset’ option as required for your particular iPod/iPhone in the right hand ‘Presets’ panel.  I use the iPod Low-Rez because I only view converted DVD’s on my Nano.  If you intend to view the converted DVD’s on your computer from within the iTunes application, you should use the iPod High-Rez preset otherwise the resultant video when viewed on the computer may be of undesirable size/quality.

Finally, click the ‘Start’ button in upper left hand corner of the main Handbrake screen and let the conversion run.  In my brief experience using this process, the conversion takes roughly half the time of actual film run length.  So for a 2 hour movie, expect about 1 hour to convert.  This is better than the decrypt to large VOB file and then convert, which I found to take the full run length of the movie being converted.

Once the DVD has been converted to the H.264 format as a file on disk, you can open up iTunes and add it to your library.  After that, you can sync the movie to your iPod/iPhone by selecting from the sync list in the Movie tab of the sync settings within iTunes.

Simple as that.

If you would prefer to have an all-in-one application that can accomplish the same as DVD43 and Handbrake used in combination, then I would recommend Cucusoft Ultimate DVD and Video Convertor Suite.  It is a commercial product, but when I tested their trial version, it worked flawlessly and performed at the same or maybe slightly faster speed.  If you want to read more or try their trial version, you can visit their web site here.  Personally, I prefer the free approach. 

Posted in iPod Tips and Tricks |

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