Software Review: DVD to iPod Converter
Category: Apple/Mac OS... Movies... Tech...
Posted Friday, January 05, 2007 at 09:12 AM [GMT-6]

Note: This post originally began as a third installment of "New Things in Our House," with an emphasis on my new iPod, but it unfolded differently than I envisioned and it seems more appropriate to style it as a software review. I mention this only to demonstrate that, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, some actual conscious reasoning is occasionally applied to what gets posted here. However, I wouldn't advise getting used to it.

My wife gave me an 80 gigabyte iPod for Christmas, the model with video capability. It's been fun to browse through the various TV shows and movies that Apple offers via the iTunes Store, and I've even bought a couple of episodes of The Office that I missed earlier this season. But that's just child's play when compared to the end game: loading commercial DVDs I already own* onto the 'pod.

This is not an easy process, for reasons both technical and legal. Well, the technical part arises from the legal part, I think, as the copy protection (isn't it more accurate to call it "copy prevention"?) schemes used by the movie studios make the conversion of the DVD content to an iPod-compatible format somewhat challenging. I have to wonder why they bother, as it seems that everybody and their dog has come up with ways to circumvent those schemes.

I'm testing one right now, as a matter of fact. It goes by the unimaginative-but-Google-friendly name of "DVD to iPod Converter", created by a company with another unimaginative name, MP4 Converter. [Side note: Someone really should do a scholarly study of how the increased significance of search engines has affected the approach to the naming of companies and products.] The preceding product link goes to the Mac version but there's also a version for Windows.

This $29 program offers one-click conversion of commercial DVDs to MP4 format, the video flavor of choice for your typical vPod. I was hoping to give you a detailed review of the various options that the program provides, but among its flaws is the lack of a user guide. I emailed the company about that last night, and had a response within eight hours, which is pretty amazing in itself. Unfortunately, the response confirmed what I feared: there is no user guide at this point; the company is presumably working on one, but for now, you're flying the program by the seat of your pants. On the other hand, if their tech support continues to be this responsive, that may not be a huge drawback. And unless you want to push the envelope on what the program will do, the basic controls are fairly intuitive and the default values work well.

Even without instructions, I was able to convert a full-length movie (Serenity, if you must know) to MP4, import it to iTunes and then onto my new iPod, where it performed admirably. However, there are a few bumps in the road:

• Speed: The application's website promises speed...with a caveat: Speed without limits, conversion speed increases with the power of your system. Translation: Our program is as fast as your computer. My 17" PowerBook G4 is no speed demon, but I was still surprised that it took just over four hours to convert this two hour movie. Granted, I ripped the DVD at the highest video setting (the program labels the setting as "Excellent") and I'm sure that contributed to the slowness of the process. The program doesn't come in Universal Binary; there's a separate download for Intel Macs, and I would expect a significant speed boost in that version.
  
  I'm now re-ripping the DVD using the "Normal" quality setting (1200 Kbps vs. 2400 for the "Excellent" setting), and I can't perceive any difference in speed. We're at the 50% mark of the conversion and that's taken two hours.
  
  Update: The second conversion, using the "Normal" quality setting, took the same amount of time as using the "Excellent" setting. However, the resulting file was about 1.1gb, or 35% smaller than the file produced by the higher quality setting. Plus, I could discern absolutely no difference in video quality when viewed on my iPod.


• File size: The resulting video is 1.7 gigabytes. Again, that's a function of the quality setting, and the lower setting will produce a smaller file. However, I'll be interested to see how the quality differences play out on the iPod's teensy screen. I'm thinking that you don't really want to give up much quality considering how much detail you're foregoing to begin with due to the small screen size. In any event, at around 2 gig per movie, my iPod will hold "only" about 40 movies...but that assumes that I don't want to carry any music or photos. Thus far, I can do without the latter, but an iPod without tunes is like a day without rutabagas, IYKWIM.


• Weird stuff: The program split the movie into two segments which appear as separate movies when imported into iTunes. I tried pretending that I was watching a laser disc and the break was just the platter flipping, but I was unconvincing. This is where a user guide would have saved some frustration. As it turns out, there's an option in the "Advance" configuration settings that allows you to specify that the converted video be divided into segments, presumably for copying to CDs or other media with limited capacity. You can specify the segment size by time or storage space (in megabytes). There's also an "Infinite" setting that allows conversion into a single file. Strangely, the default value is a 1 gigabyte segment; you have to remember to select "Infinite" each time you rip a DVD. This is a lesson that should be quickly learned, especially if you have a system as slow as mine.

Actually, I don't hold out much hope for the user guide, when it finally appears. This program was either created by folks who aren't native English speakers, or they let their third graders compile the text not only for their website but also for various dialog boxes in the program. Here's a screen shot from one:

Despite all of these things, the video and audio quality of the resulting file is really quite good when played back via the iPod. You can also choose a conversion scheme that appears to create a file that's optimized for connecting your iPod to a TV (sure wish I had a user guide), although it's not intuitive to me what the difference would be. The "Advance" options appear to provide you with the ability to make the converted movie into "pan and scan" (vs. letterbox); you can also carry subtitles over to the converted file, but I don't see where the software company will reimburse your medical costs for the acute eyestrain that would surely accompany trying to read 'em on an iPod display. And, for you audio buffs, there's an option for retaining Dolby surround sound in the conversion.

Really, for $30 bucks, this is a great deal for anyone who wants a simple way to transfer their movies from DVD to iPod. I'll try to post a follow-up report after I've had time to test some of the options, but if you're looking for a quick and easy method of DVD conversion, you should consider this one. There are some free tools available (Handbrake and MacTheRipper come to mind) but I don't think they offer the same turnkey ease and completeness of this program.

You can download a demo version of DVD to iPod Converter, but it allows you to convert only 5 minutes of a movie. It occurs to me, however, that for some films -- anything starring Rob Schneider, for example -- that's more than enough.

*Don't steal movies. That's just wrong.

Technorati tags: DVD to iPod Converter | Ripping DVDs | Loading movies on an iPod