“Handbrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.”

Handbrake is a nice tool to have when you like to archive your DVD collection to digital file. This has been a pretty big thing for me since the original XBox. I love to have a copy of some DVD movies on my computer to playback on my XBox or Xbox 360. I started early using CD, I would buy a CD spin it once in my computer to rip it to the HD and it would probably never be put in a CD player again. From then on I would burn copies of the CD to be played in my car or anything else. I have gotten to that point with my DVD collection, buy the dvd, and rip a copy to my HD to playback on my XBox.

One big plus for this application is that it will take the movie straight off DVD and convert it to a lot of different formats. It has a Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Apple Tv, and many of profiles available to convert videos to. Using these profiles will convert the video to the correct specs to playback on that particular device. This helps out and saves time on having to specify these settings on your own.

Handbrake released the newest version of its software on November 23rd, 2008. In this release I think they made one of the biggest mistakes for the Windows version of Handbrake. There is no longer internal DVD decryption. Not much of a problem for Linux or Mac, as long as you have libdvdcss for Linux and VLC for Mac then you will not even notice a difference. They do not mention an easy solution for Windows and I was unable to get Hanbrake to decrypt DVDs. That is not saying much, I don’t spend a lot of time using Windows anymore so I didn’t give it much effort. I would expect something like that out of a Linux application, but Windows?