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Please try Handbrake: https://handbrake.fr/ it's freeware Not sure, if it fits all your needs but I use it a lot to convert my movie files to a format which my TV likes..

The problem is Handbrake isn't a signed app, period.

Actually, it is signed. While they don't use an Apple Developer certificate, they still do cryptographically sign each release. All of that is in addition to providing SHA1 and SHA256 checksums.

As I said, the user didn't check the signature, and you're quite right that they blew by the warnings about the app being from an unidentified developer, given that those warnings already occur even with the official Handbrake releases. Even so, your claim that they don't sign their releases is entirely incorrect.

0.10.5 on MacOS does not believe any new updates are available.

Then go pay a visit to handbrake.fr, download the 1.0.0 release, manually install it and shout "in your face" at your 0.10.5 as it's being overwritten.

most user uses chrome which has flash and will ditch it soon. why release that?

True, but if you have a Flash video (ie *.flv) you could always use VLC or MPV to play them.

Of course, if you don't like flash videos in their raw format you could use HandBreak to transcode them, although a word of warning, HandBreak is really CPU intensive so you would be better off with a decent one unless you don't mind the wait.

For most Linux distributions you can download the players or transcoder by using their respective repository allowing them to be automatically maintained. Also for your interest, all the software named does support 8bit, 10bit, 12bit as well as the H254 and H265 codecs including other formats.

Don't forget the nightly builds too. https://handbrake.fr/nightly.p...

HandBrake has x265 built in.

https://handbrake.fr/

It has some quirks though. It's GUI based, but some of the defaults are plain stupid. Someone wanting "simple" is at risk of getting "inferior" instead.

If you want to devote the time to learning the quirks, you can export a preset for your users once you've got the settings right.

I made a simple preset to get you (and anyone else) started. MKV container, no cropping/resizing, no filters, default x265 settings (which you'll need to play with), untouched audio (passthru), no subtitles, no guarantees it'll even work.

http://pastebin.com/61YyQNkv

Download it and change the extension to .plist before importing from the Preset menu. Even though it says Apple in there, it was created on the Windows build.

If a change you make undoes itself after the first encode, change it back, save the change as a new preset, load the new preset and see if your change stuck.

From the FAQ: "For best results, you should feed HandBrake unprotected video." Yet the vast majority of DVDs and all BDs are protected.

... If the Linux client was a pre-compiled binary, it could probably be made reasonably secure against people trying to copy content. At least as secure as a DVD or BluRay anyway.

I'd say, you just answered your own question: If a Linux binary could be made "at least as secure as a DVD or BluRay," then Big Media would instantly label it as a non-starter, because optical media is not even remotely secure at this point; all you need to do is pop open MakeMKV, and those movies will come off of the disk in an unencrypted format in short order, ready to be converted by Handbrake for whatever purpose you might find appealing, from PSP to piracy.

Which, I think, is actually the entire point of going to DRMed streaming media... Big Media is actually trying to make it harder to decrypt their content, rather than maintain the status quo.

Honestly I assume that by now it's exceedingly annoying to try to rip those things, and the one I can download from iTunes is pretty much there and good to go in much less time. And spending too much time on it isn't exactly how I want to spend my time these days.

MakeMKV makes it trivial to do a 1:1 rip of your Bluray into an MKV container that has the primary video and audio stream. If you need any conversion after that for tablets etc... Handbrake does the job very well.

http://makemkv.com/ http://handbrake.fr/

Both are really as point can click as it gets.

Steps for ignorant assholes that have a faint grasp on theory and zero on facts, yet like to insult others:

1. Download a popular encoder/decoder such as handbrake http://handbrake.fr/
2. Download a popular hardware monitor that does real time monitoring of various parts of your system, such as openhardwaremonitor http://openhardwaremonitor.org/
3. Download process explorer: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx
4. Get any h.264 movie. You can rip one from youtube.
5. Re-encode the video into any other popular standard, ranging from h.264 to divx. Pay attention to usage. Use openhardwaremonitor for specific CPU/GPU load monitoring and process explorer for memory footprint.
Optional if you have a decent system:
1. Go into your bios. Slow your memory/FSB down as much as you can. Overclock CPU to get same speed on the slower FSB.
2. Restart the system, try re-encoding with exact same settings.
3. Observe your own ignorance as your performance take little impact.
Optional 2: Attempt to do the same in opposite direction, or even insert faster RAM into the system. Note how your performance tanks hard in direct relation to CPU in this case.

Do you know why? Because most encoder/decoder software is optimized properly and doesn't need a huge memory footprint. I like watching anime fluff on the go on my phone, so I routinely re-encode h.264 720p and 1080p video into 360p divx that my phone can run for a long while without killing the battery (it's old enough to lack proper h.264 support). As I have to re-encode routinely, I've done some actual research on how to make the process as speedy as possible. As a result, I ended up buying fastest i5 on the market that was available and essentially slowest memory it would take. Because the main things that need performance that I do are gaming and video encoding. And both are CPU and GPU bound and memory throughput is largely irrelevant as long as its "fast enough not to bottleneck the system" because of it. Criteria which the slowest available memory at the point of buying the CPU met with plenty to spare.

As for your hilarious claims in relation to the original topic of OS "memory optimizations", issue is that data portion that needs high throughput of memory when decoding/encoding is direct and largely uncacheable, meaning that OS optimizations have little to no impact and is mainly dependent on hardware. That's because it contains the actual video. And in most cases, unless you're encoding in fast GPU hardware while using slow system RAM, you'll be bottlenecked by computing power rather then by memory throughput - which is essentially always true on modern PC architechture. And even if you were limited by memory throughput, there is little to nothing that OS optimizations can do to alleviate the problem, as video encoding is largely not cacheable. It needs actual brutal throughput. Memory management in such tasks is typically best left to the application doing the decode/encode anyway as it will handle the specialized stuff much better then generalist optimizations done by the OS.

Now if you excuse me, I need to go back to "surfing for porn". Your remark reminded me that I haven't surfed for porn in years, a revelation that I found surprisingly disturbing.

This leads to the question "Why are you using handbrakeGUI when you could use the CLI?

Aren't DVD captions images, not text?

Many DVDs have 2 types of captions. If you use handbrake, the image based captions are referred to as VOBSUB while the text based ones are referred to as CC.

https://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/Subtitles

I didn't see Handbrake on that page of search results from Freecode so I thought I'd offer this up as well. Fairly simple interface, runs flawlessly on Windows 7 and Ubuntu for me. Open source and easy way to get DVDs into m4v format. Plus there are preset resolutions for things like iPhones, iPods and I found the resolution for a PSP. So basically I spend my flights with circumaural Sennheisers and Futurama or MST3K playing on my PSP -- the worse part about that setup being that Sony's memory card cost me a ton. So far it's ripped the blu-rays I've put in just fine as well.

Rip them to m4v and host them with PS3 Media Server and then they're good to play over your network to your PS3 or XBox 360 (and probably any other UPnP compliant device).

Do I feel guilty that I have shelled out $35+ for each of the 22 sets of MST3K and each season of Futurama and then violated copyright to move said shows onto any device capable of playing video? Not one fucking bit. Go ahead and do your little song and dance, I've got my shit figured out (thank you open source!).

Argh! I should have read more closely!

I don't know if there's an equivalent of FFCoder for Linux, but off the top of my head I'd say Handbrake will probably be of some use to you. Expression might work under Wine but in any case the scripting part, which you would definitely need (no batch processing without it), is in Powershell so you're SOL there I think.

For example, I wanted mega-mind - and figured I might want to put it on my android so my daughter can watch it in the car.. But, unlike the 5 other DVD's I purchased with this combo, the ONLY one available to me on discount day (the day the DVD is released and thus sells for $8 under retail) was the full on 3D + Blue-ray + DVD + digital-copy.. It was only like $4 more, but I felt a certain anger that I was being force to subsidize this.

I agree that Hollywood would LOVE for people to repurchase their collections. They would also like to close the hole that DVDs are (ubiquitous format to rip/transcode from), both of which are why they are pushing multi-format packs.

I would also point out though, that "Discount Day" is not the day a movie is released. In fact, it is NEVER the day a movie is released. The Blu-Ray+DVD combo pack for MegaMind is currently running $13 on Amazon (okay $12.99), with a suggested retail price of $50 (okay $49.99). That certainly sounds a heck of a lot better than $8 under retail.

Even if it doesn't include Digital rights, you can either transcode it from the DVD for your portable player of choice (not terrible thanks to utilities like http://handbrake.fr/ ), or buy the Digital version of your choice for another $10 (Amazon's price, I'm assuming Apple's is comparable).

Total cost: $13-$23 instead of $50, and waiting 1-2 months (release date end of Feb), versus instant gratification.

(heck, forgo the Blu-Ray version and you can get the DVD stand-alone for $7 dropping the cost further, but I think DVDs must ultimately give way to Blu-Ray or some other optical format in the same form factor)

1) Most movies come with "Digital Copy" now. Put the code in iTunes, and you are done.
2) For the ones that don't there's always Handbrake, which has presets for it and makes it trivial to convert in a few minutes. Once it's done, drag to iTunes and sync.

There has been some discussion of this on the handbrake forum.

Nothing decided one way or the other, but the handbrake devs seem to be a pretty motivated bunch.

If you're looking for open source alternatives to iTunes: CDex, VLC and handbrake .

You forgot a big one Songbird

Have you actually tried using that? I have and its more sluggish then iTunes could ever be.

If you're looking for open source alternatives to iTunes: CDex, VLC and handbrake .

You forgot a big one Songbird

But there’s one piece of the Appleverse that I’ve always detested, and that’s the desktop version of iTunes. The ugly duckling of the iFamily, this program is hard to understand, hard to use, inelegant, and ill-behaved—in short, the very opposite of most other Apple products. I dread booting it up every day ...

Yeah, yesterday I bitched about this and have actively refused any upgrades to iTunes since 9 because I'm not sure if 10 is going to get better or worse.

Now I have to have Quicktime on my machine ... which I am not a fan of. And what's worse is that reviews are telling me that it's faster but with a crappier UI while at the same time Ping concerns me if it has my credit card information and is just a spam portal.

So while I want iTunes to run faster, I definitely don't want anything to do with this "Ping" service and if it's reminiscent of how they made me dependent on Quicktime (despite the fact that I have never used iTunes for anything video -- VLC kicks ass) I don't want auto-opted into something that I cannot get out of!

If you're looking for open source alternatives to iTunes: CDex, VLC and handbrake

My biggest problem is that support seems to wax and wane with actually moving songs/videos on and off an iPod with open source alternatives ... so that leaves me tied to the beast that is iTunes.

Handbrake is what I use:

http://handbrake.fr/

When is someone going to pull the Handbrake on this.

FOSS will have to be made illegal to this to work, which it won't.

I use Handbrake http://handbrake.fr/ for encoding. Handbrake will let you chose from MP4 or MKV for container, H.264 or Theora for video and MP3, AAC or Vorbis for audio.

I was trying to do this a little while back and found this thread on the Handbrake forums which helped: http://forum.handbrake.fr/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=13354.

The easiest way I found to encode a video for the PSP in 0.9.4 was select the iPhone preset and go to the Advanced tab and under Current Advanced x264 Option String, delete whatever was there, and paste this:

cabac=0:ref=2:me=umh:bframes=0:8x8dct=0:subq=6:weightb=0

I'm using the Mac version, though, so not sure if the Windows version has an equivalent space for a custom advanced x264 options string. If it doesn't, using that same string on the command-line should work fine too. Saving it as a new preset in the GUI seemed to work fine. Also, check the picture options to make sure that the dimensions don't exceed 480x272.

http://trac.handbrake.fr/changeset/1413 In between v0.9.3 and v0.9.4; HandBrake was patched to make Xvid/AVI work properly with DVDs that contained VBR audio. In otherwords, SVN build 1413 contains all the fixes needed to have Xvid/AVI work. This means you have to compile it yourself; but for linux this is easy. Maybe, the HandBrake team should just release this build as their final work of Xvid/AVI.

From http://handbrake.fr/ (instead of linking to a loosy article):

- AVI container removed
- OGG/OGM codec removed
- XVID codec removed (in favor of FFMPEG)

but then again you don't have to use handbrake. its not about obsoleting for the better, its obsoleting cause they couldn't be bothered to include and test them.
one should still be able to encode whichever format he likes. you might have a player that only support AVI for example.
Fortunately, you do not *have* to use handbrake. Like, you know, there's other things too. Heck I still use VirtualDub just for encoding.

http://handbrake.fr/?article=10

They don't delete IRC logs though! Start at the bottom where 0x100 comes in...

And just try telling them this. The fun part starts at the bottom with 0x100, a packager for Fedora's rmfusion.

In any case, handbrake started as an application for BeOS and didn't even have a windows gui until version 0.8.5. I was using it on macs way back in the day when 700 Mb was your practical limit because hard drive space was still more precious than blank CDs and writable DVDs were hugely expensive.

Why would they care about what windows does? It survived without windows before it was famous, it'll survive without divx -- h264 is so incredible you don't need divx anyway.

I was surprised when this happened, but I can appreciate that, ultimately, it's a legacy format. Apparently, the AVI implementation is very convoluted to keep up with new features. Here's a selected quote from their release blog: "It does not support modern container features like chapters, muxed-in subtitles, variable framerate video, or out of order frame display....The code has not been actively maintained since 2005. Keeping it in the library while implementing new features means a very convoluted data pipeline, full of conditionals that make the code more difficult to read and maintain, and make output harder to predict. As such, it is now gone. It is not coming back, and good riddance." (sadly there didnt seem to be a permalink to the whole article - here's the current news page).

As such, I've moved on and figured out which flavor of mpeg-4 works best for me; and I'm happier with the improved picture quality as a result.

For Handbrake, try the snapshotfor Karmic which has just been released. You'll have to forego avi and xvid, which have been dropped from Handbrake 0.9.4 and will never return. Good riddance, I'd say, but many people won't agree.

a high speed, high quality dvd ripper/transcoder would do it for me, and it sounds (to my uneducated mind) like something that lends itself to GPU style parallelism.

There already is an application out there that does this on Windows. The name escapes me for the moment, but I've seen a review of it in Maximum PC and from memory it showed a 2-5x speed increase over just CPU.

I'm a fan of Handbrake, so I hope that their Mac OS X version will support the OpenCL library and benefit from that.

I may sound like a jerkwad here, but why waste all that battery power watching a dvd when you could watch the divx version off local storage?

That's not a jerkwad sort of suggestion. If one knows one is going on a flight/trip, it makes all the sense in the world to rip that video to the harddrive where battery performance is far greater than with a DVD spinning for a couple hours. I'd recommend handbrake. http://handbrake.fr/

In order to read encrypted DVDs, Handbrake delegates to VNC,

No. Handbrake will use libdvdcss, if it is available, on any platform but Windows. VLC is mentioned because libdvdcss comes with VLC 0.9x.

IOW, while Handbrake itself doesn't violate the DMCA, it can be used to violate the DMCA by adding a library that actively violates the DMCA.

Also, for GP: DMCA is most certainly not US only. Other countries have laws similar to the DMCA on the books.

Windows GUI Usage Guide First things first. Handbrake on the Windows Platform does NOT decrypt Commercial DVDs. Let me repeat this. It does NOT decrypt commercial DVDs. Third-party software is required for this part of the process. (e.g. AnyDVD, DVD43 or DVD Decryptor) (Note: Please note that these applications are not legal in many countries. You should consult the law in your own country before using these applications. We do not provide support for 3rd party applications!)

Hope that clears things up instead of going up in arms about DRM. If Hollywood gets even a whiff of MS enabling any circumvention... bam.. billion dollar lawsuit.

Handbrake is the best tool that I know of.

Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X versions: http://handbrake.fr/

I see an import CD option... But no Import DVD option...

Learn to drive your iTunes. Use your Handbrake

I wonder if it only works because it is based on "libraries from the linux world..."

Handbrake is a decent ripper. Has both CLI and GUI controls, can be scripted, etc. Has lots of presets for whatever use you want from your DVD's (PSP, web, Apple TV, iPod, HD-TV, etc.).

Handbrake http://forum.handbrake.fr/http://forum.handbrake.fr from them or one of the PPAs or DVD95 if you just want to go from a double-sided to a single-sided DVD.

Why is this on slashdot? Google "linux rip dvd" for many many solutions.

If you are a button clicker, use Handbrake. Download the binary or build from source.

If you are a linux user, use mencoder. RTFMP

Handbrake they have .deb file on their site and it works like a charm.

Handbrake is the hands-down option for DVD ripping under Linux. It has presets for iPod, PSP, etc. I have tried lots and lots of apps for this, including my beloved commandline. Nothing beats Handbrake. See http://handbrake.fr/ for more info.

Without a doubt, Handbrake will do the job. I used it on an Ubuntu box in tandem with a Mac OS X box to rip my entire DVD collection.

http://handbrake.fr/

I only encountered one problem, with the third disc of the Monty Python Fly Circus set.

Live it, learn it, love it.
http://handbrake.fr/

http://handbrake.fr/

I use it on my Mac and it produces pretty decent encodes, even with the presets.

I find Handbrake works excellently under OSX, and, seeing as it has a Linux/GUI version, it may be worth trying out.

http://handbrake.fr

I know we're talking about business desktops here, but since the summary is challenging Moore's Law I want to make a point about thirst for CPU grunt.

I believe mainstream video content will drive demand for faster processors - especially with consumers - over the next few years, with codec complexity looking set to keep pace with chip development. Streamed, purchased and pirated SD has proven that watching video content on the computer is something Joe Public wants to do. Now HD is gaining momentum and marking CPUs obsolete; Joe's computer won't play His.Favourite.Show.720p.x264.OMG-WTF.mkv. Joe might even rip DVDs to play on his PMP/phone/netbook - or he would if it didn't take so long.

Oh, and if you think your pre-2007 computer has still got it, try playing some 1080p movie trailers.

People who buy quad core processors nowadays either want extremely performance for multithreaded tasks and are willing to pay (a lot!) or they're total dumbasses, in either case they'll buy an i7.

Actually the lower-end quad core chips aren't expensive and quad core is now mainstream - for their average desktops, Dell seem to be choosing low-end C2Q chips in preference to higher-clocked C2Ds. I think this is because the typical consumer and computer store salesman have switched from clock speed to cores as the performance differentiator - "this one's faster - it's a quad".

Personally, for my heaviest uses, Handbrake and Folding@Home, I'll take more CPU grunt in whatever form happens to be most cost effective: more cores or faster cores. The Q6600 is popular because you get both: four cores, easily clocked to 3.4GHz+ - that's a lot of grunt for under $200.