When I picked up a 60GB video iPod, I felt like I did when I first discovered MP3 music files. Back then, SoundJam made it easy to take my library of CDs and rip my own digital versions of those songs. Now I wanted to do the same thing for all of those DVDs on my shelf. The movie industry makes this more difficult with region codes and encryption and the file sizes and processing power required are also an order of magnitude larger.

After spending several weekends reading online tutorials and experimenting with different programs, I have finally found a process that I’m happy with. It’s not perfect, but it creates a nice balance between file size and picture quality. It also let’s me queue up files to process overnight, which is handy. I’ve now filled up the iPod and have started using two external hard drives to create an archive of movie files that can be swapped with the iPod (one for movies and one for TV shows).

Here is my process in a nutshell (running on a PowerMac G5 dual-processor tower with Mac OS X):

• Use MacTheRipper to create a Video_TS folder on my local hard drive.
• Use HandBrake to create an .mp4 file from the Video_TS folder data.
• Use iTunes to copy the .mp4 files to the video iPod.
• Back up the .mp4 files to external storage.

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