HandBrake was my free tool of choice to get movies from DVD's to my iPod. It would even handle CSS encrypted DVD's. The HandBrake interface was never terribly user-friendly, and I often forgot some setting or other which I only discovered after hours of transcoding. Well, a new application has taken up where HandBrake left off, MediaFork. Hopefully, development will continue on this handy piece of freeware. The best improvement with MediaFork is that the settings for h.264 encoding (which is what I use for my iPod), now include an "iPod" setting, which was formerly called Baseline. The default bitrate is still too high for the iPod specs. I usually set the h.264 settings to 500 kbps. Then don't foget to scale the video down to 320x240 for the iPod.
BTW, some people ask me if I recommend using HandBrake (now MediaFork) to edit DVD's in FCP. For editing, I think it is worth the money to go with DVDxDV. None of the compression settings with MediaFork are really useful for FCP without more rendering.
No comments:
Post a Comment