Sally was very interested in converting her physical DVD disks to electronic media files that she could play on her iTunes, iPod, iPhone or AppleTV. But, the problem was that there was no easy way to convert the huge DVD files and make them fit and play smoothly on her mobile and iTunes supported devices. Then Sally came across a really great, Open Source program called Handbrake. Little did she know this free software tool would be the answer to her problems.
Handbrake is an awesome utility that will not only compress DVD and other video sources into a single file, it will also create a final video file that is formatted and encoded properly for your Apple device. Sally looked at BestBuy and a few online retailers for a product that would compress and reformat her video library but came up empty handed.
She then looked at the Open Source software sources on the Internet and was very surprised to see the large number of utilities that claimed to do exactly what she wanted. After a few mis-starts with some spyware soaked programs, Sally read a recommendation for a good number of open source software programs, among them was VLC player, Xvid, and Handbrake. To her surprise, Handbrake installed easily and didn’t have any embedded spyware, gray ware or malware. She got the install done and was compressing her first DVD within 10 minutes. The program is so easy to use and has many automated features for even the novice end user that has attempted a video transfer. Sally was really impressed with the results as well. She could strip out the previews, menus and just start the movie exactly at the main title screen. Handbrake had so many flexible options that she started a huge conversion project for her favorite movies. Many people don’t know about programs like Handbrake because they assume for anything to be any good, they must pay a lot of money for it. In this case, the Open Source development efforts of people involved with Handbrake look out for the end-user and have produced a great and stable video compression product that helps get your media where you want it.
