rickybee.com

I have had quite a few portable media devices, from off-brand to the iPod Touch and most recently my G1 Android phone. They all have one issue in common and that is how to convert your personally owned DVD's into a format that will play on the device. To accomplish this task usually requires two stages, ripping the DVD to your hard drive, then encoding the files into a format that your device can play. The trick is to be able to create the smallest file without losing quality.

There are a lot of products out there to do this; A-One DVD Ripper, Aplus Total DVD Ripper, DVD Ripper Ultimate, DVD Fab, FairUse Wizard, Handbrake, Wondershare..... etc. etc. Some of these are rippers, some converters and some try to do both. I have tried them all, some do better than others. But I am writing today because I found one I really like, WinX DVD Ripper. There is a free version so you can try it out but if you're like me you will end up paying for the Platinum edition which has more profiles.

The advantage of this software is that it does everything in one go. Just point it at the DVD drive with the disc in it, make a couple of selections and hit Start. So far it has done a really good job of creating a quality file for both my G1 and main computer.

If you have a G1 here's a tip for you, always use H.264 over MPEG4. I noticed during my tests, and I did quite a few, that all the files encoded with the MPEG4 codec stuttered in playback. You can see it when the camera pans over a scene. Where as the H.264 encoded files were very smooth. Oh, and by the way, there isn't exactly a tab for the G1, I just use the iPhone profiles, they work just fine.

The default settings for AVI which come up upon starting the software are just fine for playback on your laptop or desktop computer. Just remember to turn off the subtitles if you don't want them. Personally I think they should be off by default but that's just my opinion.

For those interested I use Video-H264, 480:320, 512kbs, Audio-96kbps, 32000hz for my G1, works really well.