Put A Dvd On Your Ipod For Free
First, let"s consider this process from a high-level point of view without all of the techie details.You have a DVD in your hand which you have purchased. (If you have not purchased the DVD, make sure that you have the proper rights to copy to your iPod.) This DVD is meant to be placed in your DVD player and watched on your television, ideally one of the best LCD TVs.
Now, when we consider copying DVDs to your iPod, we first need to realize that the picture on your iPod screen is much smaller than that on your LCD.
This means that we do not do a 1 for 1 copy. The size of the resulting movie file on your iPod will be much smaller than the actual size of the movie on the DVD. The size of your average DVD movie is between about 4 and 8 gigabytes. For many of you, the actual storage capacity of your iPod may only be about that size. Thus, we do not want the one movie to take up our entire iPod because we must have still have space for all of our great iTunes!
So, how are we going to transfer this DVD to our iPod and make the file size smaller? Well, we are actually going to do this in three easy steps.
First, the DVD is probably encrypted. If you have purchased the DVD, you are typically well within your rights to take it with you on the go on your iPod. If you have not, make sure you have the right to decrypt. So, we will use a program called DVD43 to decrypt our DVD. This program is found on the Internet and is very simple to use.
Next, we copy the contents of the data, and convert this data for iPod use at the same time using a program called HandBrake. Like DVD43, HandBrake is available as a free download on the Internet. Within HandBrake, we can accept most of the defaults but we want to make sure that we choose iPod as the file output type.
Finally, we simply take this file that HandBrake has created and add it to our iTunes which we will then synch with our iPod.
The only part of this process that takes time is the actual coping of the DVD contents from the DVD to your computer. Other than that, this process is a snap to learn.
Once you realize the great benefits of having full DVD movies on your iPod-movies on the go wherever and whenever, you will be performing this process all the time.