The PasteBoard

I have kids. Four to be precise and they are all little darlings. They do what kids do. Open DVD box, take out DVD, play it in DVD player, leave it lying at their arses. Use it for a coaster. Make an uneven table even by sticking it under one of the legs. Use it as a frisbee to beat one of their siblings with a la Shaun of the Dead.

What happens? The bloody thing ends up a scratched mess and unplayable. Sound familiar?

A piece of software I have used for quite some time and recommended to others goes a fair way towards solving the problem and then solves some other problems just for good measure. Again, the link on the title takes you to the software in question.

Handbrake is a DVD ripper. It takes an original DVD and makes a file of the movie on your computer. Generally it makes it an mpeg file which can be played in a player such as QuickTime. Now, let me be clear. I am not condoning in any way the pirating of films. When I have done this in the past it has been with content I have bought. In America, that is termed as 'Fair Use'. Ireland and the UK are a bit stricter on these things so tread carefully.

While it is a wonderful way in which you can backup, protect and yet still play your bought content, it has another use which is the one I mainly use it for. That is, ripping it to play on the iPod. That plays out much better these days with the likes of the iPod Touch and the new iPod nano's which are widescreen so ripping these to play on them really looks the part and quality wise it is pretty brilliant.

However, the Handbrake people have really gone to town on enhancing the latest version. Handbrake has moved to 0.9.3 and is Open Source so that makes it free. That magic word again. For a 0.0.1 revision it is packed full of new stuff. Look up the Handbrake website to find out all that is new but two things stick out.

First, it allows you to use any video source and rip it out any way you like.

Second, it links to the previous blog post regarding VLC. It actually uses the codecs found within the new version of VLC and uses them to rip and encode so the best way to get the very best out of Handbrake is also to install VLC. Again, it is all free so no need to panic. There is more  but even these two things make this new version of Handbrake a must get. As you can see from the link, it is again a multi-platform piece of software although it was originally a Mac only app. These days Windows and Linux users get in on the action which makes this piece of software another tool in the video arsenal.

So go, download it now.