The other day a colleague, Ryan Garner! you may have heard him on Simon Mayos drive talking about iPad sales (tech expert) no big deal! said he was thinking about digitizing his DVD collection. It got me thinking, it’s about that time that hard drives are so big and compression routines so efficient that we all should start to think about having our films as files. I have a few DVDs as digital downloads and a few I have converted for my iPhone but with 160gb of ps3 hard drive sitting there doing nothing why haven’t I taken the iPod mentality with my DVDs and got them all on a hard drive. So it’s testing time.
I started by looking at the old iPod exports I had done a few years ago but I was after something that wouldn’t look to degraded on a 40″ TV. I remembered having a download available with my x-men origins DVD I bought recently and so download it to look at the file. It was slightly bigger at 8 x but still what would this look like on a 1080 tv, I was optimistic as it looked pretty good in full screen on the MacBook. So the next step was to play it from the PlayStation. No transfer need, see Media Streaming from an Apple computer to a PS3 using MediaLink…. No worries, here to help!
So, next to look at some software, exports settings and codecs. My preferred DVD ripping software is Handbrake on the mac but have a search on Softpedia or Download.com if you are using a PC for alternatives. Handbrake has a few export presets so I tried a few to compare results. When these exports are played back on laptop there isn’t much in the quality although the files sizes can differ dramatically. I exported another targeting the file size to around 700 mb, this produces a very low bitrate and a noticeable reduction in quality. I next produced an export with a targeted bitrate. Many video files on my laptop had a bitrate of around 1500 so I thought it would be interesting to see what file size this produced. The results were a medium size file, approximate 2 gig and a good quality. The test would be though which files I could play through the TV and still be happy with the quality. My opinion is that if you are after DVD quality videos you need to target the 4 to 5 gig file size with minimum compression. If you are happy to notice slight pixelation in your image and funnily enough this occurs on the flat chunks of colour then go-ahead and start reducing the bitrate.
There Is other software and codecs that do the same sort of job, DIVX has a very good compression routine and produces small file sizes in high quality, just make sure you check what file extensions your devices can playback before you compress your entire collection.
OSX does not have the regular start menu you see in Windows. We navigate the file system and programs using the Finder. Finder is the equivalent of Windows Explorer, by double clicking on the Macintosh HD on the top right corner of the desktop you open a finder window. Here you will find all files and folders including all programs. By clicking on the apple in the top left corner you will see your recent documents and files. Programs are opened using the Dock across the bottom of the screen or in the application (Finder) folder.
To quickly launch your programs the Dock can be set up to include “shortcuts” or using Mac’s naming convention “aliases”. It is possible to drag and drop your applications from the application folder to the dock in order to create these aliases.
Close (Red) – Closing the window only closes the window and not the program. The program will still be running in the background. Programs that are running are shown with a highlighted with dot under the application icon on the dock.
The camera end of the firewire 400 lead. Although most cameras have USB connections the firewire lead allows for faster data transfers capable of real time playback on the computer as you view and capture footage.
