Automatic Conversion of DVD to iPhone and Ipod Touch Format

Mon 14 September 2009 Category: Uncategorized

If you have some DVD's that you want to convert to your iPhone or iPod touch, there is already a nice solution called 'Handbrake'.

However, if you want to convert multiple DVD's and don't want to spend time manually adding each movie or episode to the queue, I might have some solution for you. I've written a script that uses HandBrakeCLI, the command-line version of Handbrake. This script is called "dvd2iphone" and can be downloaded here.

This script uses the VIDEO_TS folder or even the ISO image as input, and then processes all movies or episodes that are found, which are automatically named.

To be able to use this script, you need the command-line (CLI) version of Handbrake, which can be found here. Place this binary on your system and place the dvd2iphone script in the same directory.

Usage:

./dvd2iphone.sh (INPUT)

for example:

./dvd2iphone.sh /cdrom/VIDEO_TS

or

./dvd2iphone.sh casablanca.iso

This script can only process a single VIDEO_TS folder or single ISO at a time. However, you can create a text file containing a list of to-be-processed files and use PPSS on this list, in combination with the dvd2iphone script to automatically process all the DVD's.

Warning; you might want to edit the HandBrake command in the script to select the correct audio track and to add subtitles.

Please note that Handbrake can only use up to four cores to encode a single movie. If you have more then four cores available, it may be worthwile to run two instances of Handbrake simultaneously. PPSS is ideal for such a setup. Since my Core 7i 920 emulates 8 logical cores, I can encode two regular DVD's to the iPhone format at a framerate of arount 100 fps, for each DVD, which is 200 fps combined!

I will also create another version of this script that will allow you to transcode your DVD's to mp4 format at the same resolution. This allows you to reduce the size of your video collection on disk considerably, without loss of quality.

Although Handbrake is available for Windows, you have to figure out yourself how to run a Bash script under Windows.

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