DVD video to iPad

Jaybird180

Jaybird180

Final Approach
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Jaybird180
The other day, the thought came to mind to transfer some video to iPad, but I was under a time contraint in which to get it done.

I used to play around with video editing, shrinking filesize, etc but never needed to get the video onto another device. It's always been from my camera to computer, or video capture to computer and occasionally I'd burn a DVD with the content. Once I tooled with some software and ended up with a bunch of .vob files and could play it back with media players on my PC, but I don't think I iTunes will accept that (can I drag/drop???)

As you can tell, I'm new to the apple world, I mostly use my iPad2 for Foreflight, email and websurfing.

What are you guys using to get your videos (or DVDs) to your iPad?
 
Handbrake. Great software.

The DVD manufacturers still include lots of things to make it difficult to make copies of your own "content" you already paid for, though.

Your mileage may vary. ;)
 
<enter the spammers>

Somehow they always find threads like this (via google alerts, I think) and start posting about "cool software that they found".

**Warning, if your response to this thread is your first post on PoA...it is likely that your post and your account will be deleted.**
 
Handbrake worked, but took nearly 12 hours. This was on unencrypted video material.

Admittedly, I did not use my mediacenter, which has video editing hardware, but DANG!
 
Jaybird180 said:
Handbrake worked, but took nearly 12 hours. This was on unencrypted video material.

Admittedly, I did not use my mediacenter, which has video editing hardware, but DANG!
Click to expand...

Yup... transcoding is CPU intensive. How big was the source file? (HD? SD? How many minutes of video?)

You might also check that your media center really has chipsets for encoding... most media center type boxes have great *playback* chipsets, but don't really have the horsepower to do encoding, and choke because they rely on an inexpensive slower main CPU to do the heavy math lifting.

You might find your regular day-to-day machine has much more CPU than the media center, and would encode faster.

I doubt the media center machine has one of these, for example: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2554

Were you on a Mac, or a PC... and how much CPU do you have? Just curious. 12 hours seems like either it's a fairly slow machine, or maybe you had some of the quality settings cranked way up.

If you're going to do a lot of movies, you may have to set up some workflows that allow you to read/rip the DVD to a central storage location and then have HandBrake transcode them in batch mode from multiple machines...

Unfortunately even though it's easy to use, HandBrake isn't "cluster aware" or have its own work-slicing mechanism to share the chores amongst multiple machines, that I'm aware of.

If you're dealing with non-encrypted/non-copy-protected video, various video editors out there have built-in "render farm" capabilities... buy enough copies of the software to put it on all the machines, configure the "farm" and when you hit the render button, every machine gets a chunk of the video to process. Many small filmmakers use this to their advantage.

There are Linux tools that can do what Handbrake does with more required brain-damage to learn their command line options, and some are multi-threaded, so they can run on various clustering technologies... if you feel like building a real render farm/clustered compute farm, but that's massive overkill for a home setup, unless you're REALLY into it. ;)
 
The mediacenter is a machine I built a few years ago (geez, more like 6 years) to make my life easier. It started as a solution to keep up to date with the AMA series, WSBK and MotoGP. It grew into a few TB video data storage solution. I added some editing software, intending to retain the data and save space or burn to DVD. Then I discovered that my time was worth more than it cost for more HDD space.

The machine is used, is quite CPU underpowered and IIRC about 512 RAM PC.

I have no intention of making this an entire production, just wanting to get some portable video from time to time. I'm wondering if a $99 portable DVD player may be better for my needs instead of the iPad.
 
denverpilot said:
If you're going to do a lot of movies, you may have to set up some workflows that allow you to read/rip the DVD to a central storage location and then have HandBrake transcode them in batch mode from multiple machines...
Click to expand...

Indeed. I have read the ripping via Handbrake is slower, because it has to go out to VLC to do the deCSS'ing. Most people use a separate rip program and then batch encode as Nate mentions.
 
Jaybird180 said:
The machine is used, is quite CPU underpowered and IIRC about 512 RAM PC.
Click to expand...

There's yer problem. Ya needs mo' RAM. Much mo!

Also, there is no substitute for number of processor cores. :)
 
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Now that I know the process actually WORKS, I'll give Handbrake another try on the faster machine and see how it goes. It needs a new optical drive anyhow.
 
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