DVDs on AppleTV with Handbrake

The AppleTV is great at playing rented and downloaded movies but leaves you out in the cold with your existing DVD collection. I can rip my Audio CDs into iTunes and play them on my AppleTV but DVDs have no such support.

To remedy this, some say the AppleTV should have had a DVD drive but it is a forward thinking move on Apple's part not to have one. As I mentioned before, physical formats will become a thing of the past. Having a DVD drive in an AppleTV would have sidetracked the whole point of the AppleTV by making it a glorified DVD player. By making the AppleTV unlike anything else in the livingroom, Apple kept the focus on creating a bridge with the computing world with its concept of downloaded files. Five years from now when the DVD collection will be considered "so 2000", Apple's ideas about breaking free of the physical formats will seem commonplace.

But we still need to unlock the those DVD collections and turn them into files that the AppleTV can play. The AppleTV is fairly conservative about what it will play, opting for a maximum of 1280 x 720 MPEG 4 video encoded at no more than at 5 Mbps but this resolution is still far better than the best DVDs out there. So all we need is a way to take those DVDs with their MPEG 2 video files and transcode them into MPEG 4 within the above constraints.

Thankfully, the free program "Handbrake" exists with a built in preset for the AppleTV that takes all the complexity out of doing this. Over the past few months I have been ripping all of my DVDs into files that can be loaded into iTunes and played on the AppleTV. The thought is to rip and eventually throw away all of my DVDs just like I did with my Audio CDs back in 1997.

The process is simple. Start Handbrake and drop in a DVD. When the DVD is recognized, Handbrake will automatically select the largest video which is usually the main feature on the DVD. Pick the "AppleTV" preset from the drawer on the right and then click "Picture Settings..." to check if you need to de-interlace the picture. (Just set it to "fast" if you see frames with blurred lines. The picture will clean up if de-interlacing helped.) Then you click the big "Start" button near the top and wait a while for the process to finish. The result will be a video file that you can drag into iTunes and sync to the AppleTV.


(Screenshot)

This works well for DVDs but what about other video files like the ones you make with your video camera? Shouldn't those be viewable on your AppleTV as well? Thankfully there is another free (but Mac only) program with handy presets for the AppleTV for that as well called VisualHub. Similarly, you drop video clips in just about any format into the main window and select iTunes on the tabs and AppleTV from the pulldown and click "Start". I usually check "H.264 Encoding" and set the quality to "High" as well. The resulting files can be dragged into iTunes and synced to an AppleTV.


(Screenshot)

Now that I have a little system figured out for all of my video media files, I have been on an encoding binge to get everything converted. The problem is that the AppleTV can't store everything I have converted. There is a way to hack your AppleTV to add external USB storage but that is the subject of another post. Additionally, the AppleTV's menu system isn't the most convenient for navigating what will become hundreds of video files. I'm afraid I'm going to have to wait for Apple to figure that one out as they add more and more space to the AppleTV units of the future. I suspect we won't see significantly increased AppleTV space until the menu system for local files becomes more navigable.

The sooner we convert to a world without physical format limitations, the better. You know that whole HD-DVD vs. BlueRay debate? That was so 2000's...

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Comments (1)

joy from USA

i just found this handbrake mac guide:

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-rip-DVDs-on-Mac-with-HandBrake/

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