I’ve been preparing for a holiday in Indonesia with my family. My better half (distinctly) being originally a native of Java (the island, not the programing language). This has meant transferring a choice selection of movies etc. from DVD to my iPhone to keep my son and I amused during the long flight and for the quite times during the holiday – my son who’s six speaks more Bahasa Indonesian than I do so having some English language entertainment to hand also helps with my sanity.
Getting from DVD to iPhone (pod, mp3 player etc) may sound simple enough and the most common of question I get about it “What tool do you uses?” belies the fact that some times it just aint that simple. For starter the Mordorian idea of one tool to do it all unfortunately does not exist. In my experience I’ve never been able to find a peice of software that allows me to put a DVD in the optical media drive and buzz, gurgle, whir the content I wish to watch as been magically copied to my iPhone. Many tools claim to be able to do this but they often get stumped by a number of DVDs in your collection. So I brake the process down into small steps. First “ripping” the DVD. In my case I aim to make a soft copy of the DVD on my hard disk. The only tool that seems totally reliable and efficient for this task, on the Mac, is Mac the Ripper.
I tend to rip content then store it to either watching on my desktop as a DVD (in DVD player etc) or converting it to another format for a portable device (iPhone). Rather then have loads of folders full of AUDIO_TS, VIDEO_TS etc. folders I like to keep things neat and tidy by bundling them up into ISO image files. For this I use DMGConverter to make UDF filesystem .iso files. You might think this is a little excessive but OS X can open and mount ISO files, like disk images, if you double click on them (not sure if all versions of OS X can do this BTW). A number of apps can handle ISO files without any additional tools including VLC Media Player, HandBrake and of course DVD burning software such as Burn and Toast. ISO (ISO 9660) is also a universally accepted standard so it makes sense as a container file.
If you have Toast, it provides another way of mounting ISO files. Open the Toast application and click Utilities in the menu bar, then Mount Disk Image, navigate to your ISO file, select it and click Choose. This will mount the ISO file as if it was optical media (CD / DVD). I’ve searched high and low to try and find how to do this without Toast but no luck so far. The way Toast does it is via an application called ToastImageMounter which is bundled inside the Toast application bundle. Being able to mount ISO files as virtual optical media has the advantage that applications such as DVD Player and Mac the Ripper which expect optical media will not be disappointed. Of course having Toast open to just mount ISO files is a little OTT so if you prefer to keep things simple get a copy of ToastMount. Toast mount is a GUI for the ToastImageMounter application. If you keep it in the dock you can drag and drop ISO files on to it and they will mount on the desktop.
Now comes the tricky bit. There are loads of choices, free and paid for, for converting your DVD content to iPhone / media player compatible formats, AKA transcoding. Toast does a nice job as does HandBrake and my personal favorite (especially for batch conversion) VisualHub (sadly no longer available). All have their pros and cons but the one con many of them have is not being able to handle some of the more tricky DVDs. MTR rips copies of DVDs with some vagaries intact so the transcoding software needs to be able to deal with these. The one piece of software I’ve had consistent success with in this area is MPEG Streamclip. MPEG Streamclip has not skipped a beat no matter what I’ve thrown at it and its free software. Well almost, whilst MPEG Streamclip is free you cant transcode DVDs without the QuickTime MPEG-2 Playback Component from Apple, but this is not an expensive piece of software. In my case I forgot I’d brought it a couple of years ago but when I returned to the Apple online-store and went to my account page it was still there waiting for me to download again and it “just worked.” On thing MPEG Streamclip do is work out which clip on a DVD is the main movie, instead it presents you with a list of clips and as some DVDs can contain more then twenty clips it can be laborious trying to find the right one. In this case what I do is return to Mac the Ripper. First I mount the ISO image as a virtual optical disk using ToastMount then I use Mac the Rippers Main Feature Extraction mode to extract just the clip I want and customize the audio tract and subtitle selections (if any). Finally MPEG Streamclip does the transcoding for me. Its admittedly somewhat convoluted but I only have to do this for some of the tricky DVDs so whilst I’d not recommend MPEG Streamclip for batch conversion (as its not well designed for this) it does handle virtually any transcoding job you care to throw at it..
