Exceptional Internet

If you’ve recently acquired one of the new generation ipods it won’t be long before you are asking yourself “how do I copy my dvd’s to this thing?”. You might search the internet and you’ll probably find all manner of software for sale offering to convert your DVD movies to the iPod MP4 format, often with a price tag of as much as $50.

In an age when most types of software has a free alternative I was suprised to find how difficult it was to find a free dvd ripper or ipod video converter.

After a lot of searching and testing all manner of software I believe I have now found the easiest way using free software to rip your dvd’s and get them copied to your shiny new ipod nano (or other portable video capable device).

First you need to grab a copy of VLC player from VideoLan. This is a multimedia player/streamer/transcoder which handles all manner of formats, one of which being DVD playback. And the killer feature of this software is it’s “transcode” option that essentially allows you to save any media that it can play back to another format on your hard drive!

So what are you waiting for. Grab a copy of VideoLAN VLC player from here.

Got that? Good. Installed it? No? Well what are you waiting for, get it installed then and we can continue…

Right then the first thing you need to do is check that VLC can playback your chosen DVD. It doesn’t always manage it (my daughters copy of High School Musical 2 was particularly problematic), in which case you need to get something like DVDFab Decrypter 4 to dump the contents to your hard drive and convert from there. That’s outside the scope of this article but I’ll provide a tutorial on that subject at a later date.

• Click “File - Open Disc…”
• Choose the right drive letter for your DVD drive
• Set the title number. This bit can be trial and error, especially of you have a DVD containing multiple episodes of a TV series. Set it to 1 and click OK, if it plays the right episode or movie then great, otherwise go back in and set it to 2 and try again and so on until you have the correct episode or film.

Right, so you’ve got it playing the movie that you want to copy to your iPod, click File - Open Disc one more time. You see that bit at the bottom of the screen that says “Stream/Save”? Check that box and click “Settings”. This is where the magic happens.

The following settings are ones that I have found work most relaiably for converting for playback on a 3rd generation iPod nano. You might need to tweak them for your device.

• Under Output click the “File” checkbox. Click the browse button and select a location for your converted file.
• Set the encapsulation method to mp4
• Check the video codec box and set it to mp4v (theoretically h.264 should work but iTunes claims it’s not supported on my device so stick with mp4v if you have a nano 3rd gen) and set the bitrate - 768 seems to work nicely without dropping too much quality
• Check the audio codec box and set it to mp4a, bitrate is personal preference but it should be 128 minimum, channels 2.

!!IMPORTANT!!

By default the resolution of DVD is most likely higher than your portable player will support. On the iPod Nano 3rd gen the screen is 320 x 200 so we need to tell VLC to resize the video during transcoding you do this as follows. Make sure this is the last step you do in the settings window otherwise it will get overridden and your video won’t work on your device.

At the top of the settings window is a “Stream Output MRL” section which should have a “Target” field which now has a long settings string in it. Click into this field and be careful not to delete anything. Use your cursor keys to find the section which begins

#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,

Immediately after this enter the following:

width=320,canvas-height=200,

Don’t add any spaces and make sure you leave the rest of the string intact so the full transcode section should look something like this:

#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,width=320,canvas-height=200,vb=1024,scale=1,acodec=mpga,ab=192,channels=2}

Now click “OK”, and “OK” again and you should see VLC start to count up, essentially playing the video but without showing it. Go and make a cup of tea, or go for a kip (depending on the speed of your computer and dvd drive) and wait for it to finish.

Once it’s done simply grab your shiny new .mp4 file, drag it into iTunes and then drop it onto your iPod. Video to go. Lovely.

**warning - this process can take ages - I have found a quicker method using additional software but it does require more babysitting of each stage. But that is another article for another day. Until then happy ripping**

Filed under: Software