Convert DVDs with Handbrake

I don’t like to take my purchased movie DVDs with me when I travel but still love to have some of my favorite or new movies with me in case I would like to watch a movie on my notebook. I could of course burn those DVDs and take the backups with me but this is not ideal in my opinion. I do not like to carry any media with me when traveling.

A far better solution - at least for me - is to convert the DVD movies and put them on the hard disk of my notebook. Compressed movies usually have a size of 700 Megabytes to 1.4 Gigabytes which means that my laptop can store several movies without facing storage problems.

Handbrake is a software that lets you easily compress DVD movies. All you need is a Video_TS folder. This is the folder that is on every movie DVD. It is possible to select a preset output like Ipod High-Rez or Apple TV or keep the default one which is simply called normal.

You basically need a Video_TS folder, select a directory and name for the output and click on Encode Video to start the DVD conversion. Several settings can increase the quality of the output. You could for instance raise the bitrate or set a default framerate.

Another nice feature is the ability to queue conversions. You would need all of the Video_TS folders on your hard drive of course unless you want to swap disks after each DVD has been converted.

One should note that Handbrake is not able to convert copy protected DVDs. This means that you would need a different software to copy the contents of the movie DVD to your hard drive (and remove the copy protection) before you can convert the movie further if the DVD is copy protected.

One software that can do this is DVD Fab HD Decrypter. Handbrake is available for Microsoft Windows Apple Macintosh and Linux.

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