Ripping DVDs to iPod Touch/iPhone format with HandBrake Windows and Mac

No doubt you can purchase movies from the iTunes Store ready for iPhone/iPod Touch consumption, but if you already own the DVD, you don't want to waste your money on the same movie a second time. Instead, you can rip the DVD to a video file on your computer, move it into iTunes Library, and then sync it to your iPhone/iPod Touch. The program I'd like to recommend to do this is called HandBrake, and it's available for free on both Windows and Mac.

The following tutorial will show you how to rip DVD to iPhone/iPod Touch format using HandBrake. You can follow this guide to convert DVD to iPod Touch/iPhone whether you are using Windows OS or Mac OS X (10.5 or later).

Let's take a look at how it works:

Step 1. Download HandBrake from http://handbrake.fr/?article=download according to your computer OS and install it.





Step 2. Insert a DVD and launch HandBrake. If HandBrake doesn't recognize the DVD as a source automatically, you may have to click "Browse" and direct HandBrake to your DVD drive.

Step 3. HandBrake will analyze the DVD and let you choose the title and chapters you want to rip for your iPhone/iPod Touch (in general, you'll want the first title and every chapter). You can get an idea of which title is the main DVD title by choosing the title duration that matches the movie's playtime.

Step 4. Click the "Presets" menu in Windows, or the "Presets" button on the top right of the HandBrake window on the Mac. You'll see several presets; choose the iPhone and iPod Touch preset.

Step 5. Now just click the "Encode Video" button (Windows) or Start button (Mac) and sit back while HandBrake rips the DVD to one big file. This can take a while, so you won't be able to rip a DVD on your way out the door to the airport. Make sure you plan ahead.

Step 6. When HandBrake finishes ripping the DVD, drag the file into iTunes for syncing to your iPod Touch/iPhone whenever you want to.

Note

HandBrake Windows doesn't do a very good job on ripping DVDs to iPod Touch/iPhone format. Here, I'd like to recommend the DVD to iPhone Converter from Clone2Go. This piece of software can merge several DVD chapters into a single file, trim the video length, extract sound tracks from DVD as audio file, support M4V, MP4, MKV, AVI, FLV, WMV, and a lot more output video/audio formats, customize profile for the output file and support sorts of mobile players like iPod Touch, iPhone, Apple TV, PSP, Zune, BlackBerry, etc.

Rip DVD to iTunes for iPod iPhone

Due to high audio/video quality, iPod and iPhone are always fantastic portable devices for playing videos. Meanwhile, we may want to watch DVD movies on iPod and iPhone. Yet, a general DVD is in MPEG-2 or VOB format with CSS copy protection. To put a DVD movie onto iPod and iPhone, you need a DVD ripping program to remove the protection and rip the DVD movie to iTunes compatible video first.

For PC users, there are lots of such programs that can rip DVD movies to iTunes videos. Among them, I prefer to use Clone2Go DVD Ripper. You can download it from http://www.clone2go.com.

With Clone2Go DVD Ripper, you can convert nearly all DVDs to iTunes videos for playback on an iPod Touch, iPod Classic, iPod Nano, iPhone 3G, including purchased DVDs, original DVDs, DVD copies and even downloaded DVDs.

Below is the step by step tutorial that details how to rip DVD movies to iTunes video files, ready to transfer to your iPod/iPhone:

Step 1. Import DVD movie

Click "File -> Open DVD..." to import the DVD movie from your DVD drive. Alternatively, you can click the "Open DVD" button to import the DVD movie you are going to watch on your iPod/iPhone.



If the DVD movies is saved as a folder on your hard drive, you need to click the "Add Video" button to locate that folder, which is composed of two separate folders: VIDEO_TS and AUIDO_TS. From the VIDEO_TS folder, select the .vob file to import and then click "OK".

Note: Apart from DVD ripping feature, Clone2Go DVD Ripper can also be used to convert video files and download YouTube videos for iPod, iPhone and a lot more mobile devices.

Tip: If you want to merge several DVD chapters/titles into one single file, just multi-select them and choose "Edit -> Merge Output". What's more, Clone2Go DVD Ripper supports batch importing video files and batching convert DVD/video files.

Step 2. Trim the video

If you just need a clip of the DVD movie for viewing on your iPod/iPhone, you can drag the "Start to trim" and "Stop to trim" buttons to get the certain segment of the DVD movie.



You can also specify the "Start Time" and "Stop time" at the bottom right panel of the interface (under "Profile").



Step 3. Choose a profile

Since you are going to watch the DVD movies on your iPod/iPhone, you need to choose the output video format compatible with iTunes. From the drop-down list of "Profile", you will see profile categories including "Apple iPod" and "Apple iPhone". The formats in the corresponding categories are just for iPod Touch, iPod Classic, iPod Nano and iPhone. That's to say, the videos generated with these formats can be added to your iTunes Library.



Tip: If you are still not very satisfied with the profile you choose, you can customize it for yourself.



Step 4. Start to encode

Now you can click the "Start Encode" button to starting ripping the DVD moive to iTunes for iPod/iPhone.

Tip: The output video files are easily available by clicking the "Folder" button on the main menu after the ripping/converting process is done.

Step 5. Transfer the DVD movie to iPod/iPhone

Launch iTunes. Click "File -> Add File to Library...". Select the video file from the output folder and click "OK". Navigate to "Movies" tab and you will see the video. You can double click to play it.



Connect your iPod/iPhone to your PC and transfer the video to your iPod/iPhone with the sync of iTunes Library.

Now you can take your favorite DVD movies on the road!