A perfect way to backup your DVDs (HandBrake)

Member Name: aaronphil

Product:	HandBrake
Date:	30/07/09 (63 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Lots of presets and some great options for the advance user

Disadvantages: No DVD decryption availible so look else where to get rid of encryption

I love Handbrake and after using it with recommendation from a Cnet podcast I won't use anything else.

Essentially Handbrake is a DVD backup program, taking your DVD (.vob, .ifo) files and putting into one single video to store onto your hard drive without the need to have the disc.
Now maybe this is not too legal it is defiantly worth doing. Basically you need to backup your DVDs using a piece of software that gets rid of the annoying encryption and region protection. In my opinion the DVD manufactures have no right to stop you copying a DVD you bought, but that's a different story entirely.
So what you need to do is use a program called DVD Decrypter that gets rid of the intrusive encryption so that you can backup to your hard drive. Then you need to use Handbrake to convert those DVD files to one single video file.
You have several options in Handbrake which make it very appealing to most people. You have a selection of file types to save your video file (avi, mkv, m4v, mp4 & ogm). You can specify the overall file size which can be problematic as it sometimes messes up the aspect ratio. You can specify which audio language to include and subtitles to include. There are several preset options depending on what the input file is and what you want to do with it afterwards, because this was originally built for Mac there are a lot of Apple product presents such as iPod and QuickTime etc...
You can use decomb and deinterlace filters but then generally make the end video of worse quality and if provides the CPU with more to do when you watch it so depending on how powerful it is the video may be jerky.
The interface is simple and the buttons are straightforward. I like the preset options which give a user of inexperience with digital video something to fall back on before they balls up using the advance options.

Overall a great program for backing up DVDs, you just need something to break the encryption though.

Summary: A great way of backing up DVDs for begginners and advanced users alike

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