Ripping DVDs with Handbrake

Posted by on December 1, 2008 Leave a comment (9) Go to comments

handbrake.pngThis post is not about stealing copyrighted martial, but about backing up your personal DVDs (such as family events, etc) and converting them to a space saving file format.

There are many tools to accomplish the task of ripping and backing up your DVDs, I know, I have used most of them with different levels of success. Recently Handbrake, a multi-platform Open Source software project has been climbing to the top of the pile of different applications, through a series of constant releases and improvements, Handbrake has really set itself ahead of the pack.

If you have VLC on a Windows or Mac box, or libdvdcss on a Linux box Handbrake can copy directly from any protected DVD, however this is not needed since most home DVDs are not copy protected. Something that can be even more handy, especially when talking about legitimate uses of Handbrake, is the ability to use and folder or file as a source for encoding. There are lots of reasons why this is handy, transcoding to a more universal format, reducing the file size of an existing video and so on.

Handbrake supports a lot of great formats and containers, such as:
File format: MP4, MKV, AVI or OGM
Video: MPEG-4, H.264, or Theora (1 or 2 passes or constant quantizer/rate encoding)
Audio: AAC, MP3, Vorbis or AC-3 pass-through (supports encoding of several audio tracks)

It’s also multi-threaded and takes advantage of dual and quad core systems, which can really speed up the process of encoding your DVD to your favorite format. It also means other important tasks, like de-interlacing which gives you a much better picture do not take as long.

Check out my video for a full review:

You can catch new videos as we release them over on our YouTube channel: http://youtube.com/jupiterbroadcasting

You can find Handbrake over at their page

If you enjoyed this review, and would like to spread the word, DIGG it!

General Tech, Linux/OSS, , , ,
  • jdong

    Hey fellow LAS friends again, I’m an Ubuntu developer working on packaging for HandBrake and you can find Hardy and intrepid packages at https://edge.launchpad.net/~handbrake-ubuntu/+archive

    I might be a bit biased but I like my packaging job better than upstream’s and I’m working with them to get these into the Ubuntu repos for the future.

  • John D.

    I’d like to offer a correction for your post. Concerning copy protection and handbrake, the current version of handbrake does not interact with vlc for ripping copy protection on windows (or if it does I don’t see it working). It only does that for the mac version and only if vlc is in the /Applications directory. I haven’t used handbrake with libdvdcss on linux so cannot comment on that.

  • Alvin Lee

    Hi Chris,

    Stumbled upon your site a while ago when I was doing a search for a review of Intrepid Ibex. I basically visit Jupiter Broadcasting over at youtube. Wanted to bring to your attention that the title displayed on the homepage at http://bin-false.org has a slight spelling error. It’s displayed as “bin-flase.org”. Other webpages on this site has “bin-false.org” displayed.

  • Ben Crowe

    Windows copy protection is a weakness and does require DVD43 (free, but limited on the types of decryption it can handle) or AnyDVD (commercial) for DeCSS functions.

    Handbrake Copy Protection FAQ Here: http://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/SupportFAQ#CopyProtection

  • http://omguide.ca jdales

    Awesome post Chris. I was a huge fan of the Linux Action Show and was surprised to find this post while googling handbrake. I was having some trouble running this app on Vista. Regardless, this is my regular transcoding app that I use on, well, whatever platform that I happen to be running at the time. I love cross platform apps and wish it was more common.

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  • http://www.easydvdburning.com/ DVD Burning

    Cool ripping tool.. Is handbrake for free? I wanna try it to see if it's a good alternative for me.

  • http://freemusicformormons.com/lds-ward-choir-music roger pack

    @Ben you can also use libdvdcss.dll on windows, as an option. (google handbrake libdvdcss.dll)

  • Babycat9

    Okay, why does this page say that you can copy protected DVDs but then the FAQ page says that if it doesn’t scan properly it’s because HandBrake is not a ripper and CAN’T remove copy protection.  That’s a contradiction, so which one is it???