Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler DVD to iPod converters?

Looking for free/shareware/low cost SW to convert DVDs to an 80Gb iPod. I've googled for solutions, but I don't know whether any of them are any good. Couldn't find too many with user comments or reviews. So I look to the members of this great forum for ideas, experiences, etc. Looking for Windows XP solutions.

(We're going on a trip and wanted to have one or two of our daughter's favorites on the iPod for the trip)

Thanks!
Rich

I use and love Handbrake. It runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux and will de-CSS and recompress your DVDs in one step. The Mac version has an iPod setting, but I'm not sure about the other versions.

The Windows version requires Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 or later.

Peter
Is farely easy to use?

I'm interested in what Peter has to say too.

I can only speak for the Mac version. Yes, it's dead simple. You launch the app, specify DVD or VIDEO_TS folder, choose the output file format (mp4 or avi), choose the encoder (ffmpeg, XviD, or h.264), tweak the audio and video quality (if you want), and go. The tweaking is pretty easy. For video, you can set the bit rate, the desired final file size, or set the level of quality desired. For audio, you can choose the sample rate and bitrate, whether you have subtitles, and also whether to downmix the audio to Stereo, Dolby Surroung, DPLII, or leave it as 5.1. One very handy feature allows you to add chapter markers to quicktime files so you can skip to scenes just like on a DVD. You can also choose to output it as an anamporphic file, which is handy if you want to show it on a widescreen TV.

It sounds like a lot of details, but it's only as complicated as you want it to be. The included presets are great starting points.

Hmm. I haven't had any trouble with commercial DVDs, but I haven't ripped more than a few to date.