How-To: Turn Your Mac mini into a DVD Jukebox

Configuration: Source and Destination Panes

1. Title, Chapters

Using the Title and Chapters pull-down menus, select which portions of the DVD will be ripped to a file. You can rip just Pixar’s short films (usually on the second disk), or if you have a TV season DVD, grab each episode as a different file for easy access.

2. File format, Codecs

We want our media stored in the MPEG-4 (MP4 file) container format, with the H.264 video codec (AVC/H.264 Video / AAC Audio). Handbrake 0.7b3 defaults to MP4, but not to H.264. You have to select that each time.

3. File

Choose a file name and location for your converted video.

Configuration: Video Pane

4. Framerate (fps)

We leave the framerate at Default (Same as source). A lower framerate yields a smaller file, but the video quality clearly suffers as a result.

5. Encoder

H.264 video currently only gives one option for encoder: x264.

6. Quality

Handbrake has three methods for determining how much video compression will be used. Target size (MB) lets you squeeze a movie down to an artibrary size, say to fit on a CD or a single-layer DVD. With this setting, the longer the movie, the more compression. Average bitrate (kbps) yields a uniform file size per unit of time, meaning that My Dinner with Andre uses the same disk space as Kill Bill: Vol 1. The third option, Constant quality, uses a variable bitrate; the movie takes more space where more things are happening, and less space when not much is going on. Constant quality sounds like just the ticket.

As a rule of thumb, a constant quality setting of 50% yields a movie in the 600-1000MB range; a 60% movie is twice as large as 50%, and 70% is twice as large as 60%. We use 50% quality for animation, television content, and video with simple visuals, but we spend the space on 60% for big cinematic films.

7. Greyscale encoding

If you’re ripping a B&W movie, check the grayscale encoding to make sure that you don’t get color artifacts.

8. 2-pass encoding

If you select either the Average bitrate or Target size (MB) options, you can then opt for two-pass encoding. As the name indicates, two-pass encoding takes two laps through the movie; the first pass gathers statistics on your video in order to maximize the final quality, while the second pass actualy writes bits down to the the disk. It improves output quality, but it doubles the encoding time. As Constant quality makes those decisions on the fly, we’re not concerned with final file size.

Configuration: Subtitle and Audio Panes

9. Subtitle Language

Choose a subtitle language if you want it. Handbrake reads the subtitles off the DVD and renders them directly on the video. The subtitles are then a permanent part of the ripped video, and cannot be turned off.

10. Audio Language 1, 2

Choose the audio languages and encoding settings. By default Handbrake rips audio at 128kbps AAC; we find this setting is rather good for most movies. If you’re ripping a concert DVD (or something else where sound quality is essential to the experience), consider using a higher bitrate such as 192kpbs. You can retain at most two audio tracks from the DVD—different languages, for example, or the normal track and the commentary.

Configuration: Picture Settings

The Picture Settings button allows you to take care of crop, scale, and de-interlace the source content.

11. Size, Crop

Handbrake does a splendid job of automatically cropping the video if needed—removing letterbox black bars, for instance. You can optionally scale the video’s dimensions to save size, or optimize for a particular display resolution, but we prefer to maintain as much content as possible and leave display decisions to the playback software.

12. Deinterlace Picture

Sometimes you want to deinterlace, sometimes not. See our interlace sidebar.

Picture settings is extremely handy if you’re trying to extract a single title or chapter on a DVD, as it offers a preview of the chapter or title you’re working on. (Those Pixar shorts on disk 2, for example, can be a challenge to track down) Take an educated guess at the title you’re looking for, then use Picture settings’ preview to verify if you’ve got the right one.