Friend recently purchased and Apple Tv, wish he hadn’t… I know they are cheap, small and cute but really they are too locked to be of convenient usage to me I am much more a fan of the ps3 as a media extender.
Anyway so the question cameto be “What is is the best way to rip purchased DVDs into iTunes so that I can play them on my iPhone and Apple TV?”
Why anyone would want to play a movie or tv show on an iPhone is beyond me, I’ll just pretend he said iPad because that’s groovy to watch stuff on in bed or in the car while the missus does the driving.
The first thing you need to do is grab a few tools for the process. The worlds best media player VLC, my favorite iTunes ripping and converting tool Handbrake and lastly iDentify for tagging the files we create to make them sweet in iTunes. Please note if you decide to get the 32 bit version of either Handbrake or VLC you must also get the 32 bit version of the other and vice versa for 64 bit versions.
Handbrake will use VLC to read the commercial DVD, VLC is providing the smarts to decrypt and play the disc media and Handbrake will do the heavy lifting of ripping and converting the media so it can be added to iTunes for use on your Apple devices. Then iDentify will add the required Metadata to the resulting files so they don’t look shit in your iTunes library.
Once you have the tools it’s time to get on with the Job;
- Open Handbrake.
- Insert DVD and choose the first title then click toggle presets and choose appletv2.
- Click start.
- Choose the second title and click add to queue.
- Continue as (4) for all titles you wish to add to your library on the DVD.
- Once completed start iDentify and tag your files, they should be renamed Show S01E01
- Add the updated files to your iTunes Library.
- Make popcorn and profit.
As you can see the process is pretty straight forward without much fuss, but if you are planning on doing this a lot I highly recommend you automate the process and let it run over night using Batch Rip Actions for Automator.