DVD to iPad - free and easy

Hey there,

I won an iPad at a conference booth and use it mainly for watching movies on my train ride to work in the morning and in the evening. Besides stuff I record myself on my VDR, I recently got some DVDs from a collegue to watch. Now I had the problem that I have to reencode that movies to h264 and had no clue about how to do it in a smart (and in a cheap, preferably non-cost) way.

I've made some good experiences with handbrake. But this is not enough to reencode CSS protected DVDs. To mount the DVDs in a way that Handbrake can read them you need fairmount.

The next steps are pretty simple:

1. start fairmount
2. put in your DVD - you should see something like this:
   Don't pay attention to the wrong size which maybe is displayed in the column "Data Read"
3. Start Handbrake and choose the "VIDEO_TS" folder on the now mounted DVD.
4. To encode it for the iPad the preset "AppleTV" fits perfectly. You can choose it by clicking "Toggle Presets" on the icon bar.
   
5. You may want to change some values for the desired audio tracks etc. You can do that in the "Audio" Tab.
   
   
6. You do not have to make any changes to the video settings.

If you start the recode process you'll get a h.264 encoded file with the main title and the chapters set as on the DVD. Just copy it to you iPad and watch it with the preinstalled "Video"-App.

Done!

cheers,

wlet