I am by no means an “Internet pundit” on any issue, but a lot of my friends ask me what I think when Apple comes out with something new. I will write short posts when this happens and will link only to the best of what I see–there are plenty of other places to find links.

Earlier this week, Apple announced Boot Camp, beta software and instructions to run Windows XP on Intel-based Macs. In a nutshell, you can buy a new MacBook Pro laptop, Mac mini or iMac, install Windows XP with Boot Camp and have a computer that runs both Mac OS X and Windows XP natively. A “boot” screen appears on startup and you decide which operating system you want to run and away you go. Switching from one to the other requires a reboot.

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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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