How To: Building A Digital Movie Collection
Media has become a centric part of our lifestyle. As of recent, Apple has made it easy to collect, purchase, organize, and play media through iTunes. They’ve made it easy to access this content through the Apple TV on our High-Definition TV in our living rooms, and play it back in gorgeous 1080P resolution. But what about your existing DVD collection? Shouldn’t it get some of this attention as well? Here is a guide on building your own digital movie collection, and making the most of iTunes and Apple TV.
To complete this process, you’ll need to arm yourself with your personal DVD collection, plenty of free time, Apple iTunes, and third-party application Handbrake. Oh, don’t forget a nice large external hard-drive to house these movies (typically 1.5GB each).
What you’ll be doing is inserting DVDs into your Mac, ripping them to your hard-drive with Handbrake, importing them into iTunes, and adding meta-data.
Step One: Move your iTunes Library to an external HDD
If you don’t want to or believe you have enough space on your internal drive, skip this step.
Connect your external drive to your Mac and create a folder “iTunes” on it. Launch iTunes and head to the preferences, when here, click on advanced tab then click “Change” to re-locate your iTunes library. Navigate to the iTunes folder you created on the external drive and set this as your libraries destination.
To complete the move of your library, click “Advanced” “Consolidate Library”. This will move your entire iTunes library to the folder you specified on your external drive, while leaving iTunes in a perfect state to continue using without making any further changes.
Step Two: Handbrake
Now that your collection has a nice storage tank to lie in, you can begin digitizing your DVD collection. Start a Google search for “Handbrake” and download the application. Once downloaded, install it.
Insert a DVD into your Mac, and launch Handbrake. You will be prompted to select the DVD location; this should show automatically. Click okay.
Now it’s time to select your ripping (or encoding) settings. My preferred settings for top quality media is H.264, 2500KBPS, 2-Pass encoding. The resulted file will end up around the 1.5GB mark, and encoding will take a while depending on what Mac you have. On a 1.83Ghz Core Duo MacBook, this process takes around 3 hours for an average length movie.
If you want smaller files and a quicker rip time, set up with MP4, 1-Pass Encoding, 200MBPS.
Step Three: Organinzing Your Collection
Once the encoding is complete, you can eject the DVD and place it back in its case. The movie is now stored digitally.
You should see the movie file on your desktop, double clicking this file will open Quicktime and allow you to watch the movie, but we want an organized collection, so open iTunes and drag the movie onto the “Movie” source pane. Doing this will move the movie into your iTunes Library - once completed, it’s safe to delete the original file from your desktop. That file is now safe inside your iTunes library.
Step Four: Adding Meta-Data
The final step is to tag the movie with the correct title, and add any other information to the file you’d like to. Typically I set the movie genre, and the Year is came out in - thats all the information I need on hand. Lastly, head over to Amazon and do an image search for “movie name”. You should be presented with a bunch of DVD images, copy one of these and paste it as the artwork on the movie file.
There is no final step, you’ve successfully imported a movie into your iTunes collection, tagged it, added art, and it’s now ready for consumption directly on your Mac, on your iPod, or via your Apple TV.
Alternatively, there are a few different steps you can take to conquer a few common questions to do things such as rip a section of a movie.
FAQ
Q: Is there any way I can get rid of the ads at the start of a movie?
A: Indeed there is. Not a specific option to choose when to start the rip from, however you can select which chapters you’d like ripped. For instance, the ads are typically located on the first chapter of the movie, so with a 20 chapter movie, I’d select chapters 2-20 for encoding leaving all the unnecessary ads out of my finished file.
Q: What if I just want to extract my favorite scene from the movie?
A: Simply select the appropriate chapter/s in from the chapter selection drop-down box. Only want movie chapters 12-15? No sweat, simply drop down the boxes and make this choice. When you hit start Handbrake will only extract this section of the movie.
Q: Is there any way to quickly prepare this movie to watch on my iPod?
A: If this is what you’re wanting to do, you’re in luck. Once your DVD is inside your machine, pop open Handbrake and hit the ‘presets’ tab in the top right hand corner of the Handbrake window. This will slide open another window where you should see the option called ‘HB-iPod.’ Click this then click rip, Handbrake will automatically change the settings to output an iPod friendly file.
Q: What does 2-pass encoding do?
A: 2-pass encoding is superior to 1-pass encoding. 2-pass encoding redistributes the available bandwidth which was determined by the bitrate setting and the quanitizer setting better. For example, a high motion scene may receive a greater share of the bandwidth than a low motion scene. All in all, this will ultimately distribute a higher quality finished file if you’re willing to give 50% more time that 2-pass encoding will take.
Final Words
I’ve currently imported 53 Movies into my iTunes collection, totaling 61.05GB. The hard work I’ve done in digitizing my collection will shine once my home media setup is completed with a HDTV and Apple TV.
#1
Jorge Quinteros → www.jorgeq.com
Great article in the basic how-to in building your very own movie collection. Out of all the prerequisites to accomplish this, the only one that I always find myself missing is time.
#2
Kim → imho.me
Don’t forget to add chapter titles (if possible) in HandBrake before starting the rip. And add cast and release date (as in year, month and day, not just the year) information later through Lostify (lostify.com).
#3
Stuartyeh this has been my project for the last 6 months and i now have over 400 movies and 100 tv shows ripped from DVDs into perfect handbrake settings that look great on my 37″ HDTV to my iPhone to my iPod and of course, with the latest edition of handbrake, my movies now encode with a 5.1 soundtrack aswell as a stereo soundtrack so I can enjoy 5.1 when playing the movie choice through one of my Apple TV’s. Great Stuff. Cant wait until itunes start selling their movies with 5.1 soundtracks aswell then i wont have to buy movies on DVDs anymore such as the forthcoming Dark Knight movie. When that comes available on itunes i wont buy it from there because you will only get stereo soundtack, but if you buy the DVD then handbrake it, you can have stereo plus the 5.1 to enjoy!
Ive only got about another 30 to do then all i will have to do then is consolidate all them into the itunes directory on a soon to be purchased large (2tb +) hard drive and then get them backed up.
I now have a wonderful, crisp clean and extensive digital library which all my family and friends coo over when they come round. My niece even asks to come round just to scroll through the library!
The best bit is, that whenever I buy a movie from the itunes store, it downloads and merges with all my other content so is hard to tell the difference between a purchased and a handbraked!
#4
Michael → www.michaelgoonan.com
Awesome how-to article Glenn. It will be great to look back to when putting some movies on my ipod touch. Great to see you’re getting back at the tech writing. Now how about some videos???
#5
Matt → www.themediacenterblog.com
Great article. Thank you.
#6
Neil → www.neilchristie.com
Don’t waste your money on AppleTV. Where I live it costs £199 but for just £100 more you can get Sony’s PS3 which does a much better job of playing back media because it has a better interface and supports many, many more formats.
The best part about it is that you don’t have to use iTunes’ clunky interface to get video to the thing, just purchase MediaLink by Nullriver Software and you can stream or copy any file from your Mac to your PS3.
You can change PS3’s hard drive very easily and without invalidating the warranty. I have a 250GB drive in mine.
And as a bonus you have a proper Blu Ray and DVD player along with a great gaming system. Much, much better value for money.
#7
PatricWhat is the reason that you are doing 2-pass encoding? I don’t see the idea behind….unless you are aiming for a preset file size…..
#8
Stuart@ Patric - 2-pass encoding creates a dramatically sharper picture quality as explained in the handbrake forums/help files. I always do 2-pass encoding - a crystal clear picture is what i want which i wont have if i do just the 1-pass…
@Neil
each to their own Neil, but there are some people out there that have Apple computers, iphone’s etc and like the way Apple’s products intergrate better with one an other. We buy Apple TV’S as we are film and tv show geeks not because we wanna play games.. You may have proper blu-ray with a playstation but you still need a disc…. Apple are going digital with no discs required - its the future, look at the macbook air for evidence to support this. I for one can see where Apple are going and the future is digital. Once they release a future update for 1080p on the ATV, we will be sorted.
#9
Patric@Stuart: Thanks for information, i’ll check the help files @ handbrake. regarding the 1080p resolution: i can be totally wrong but, i think i hooked my apple tv already up at 1080p. i thought that was possible since the “take 2″-software upgrade
#10
NeilStuart - compare the bitrates of Apple’s puny “HDTV” offerings on the iTunes store with true HD content and you will see that we are decades from being able to replace discs with downloads.
#11
StuartLOL! Decades! - Brilliant. yeh ok Neil, whatever you say… you the man..
#12
JackGood post, but I was wondering - using itunes is great to manage your encoded movies - but what about your avi and divx files of other movies you may have - iTunes won’t support them which is rubbish, and makes managing your digital collection hard work..
#13
Stuart@ Jack - I sympathise with you a little Jack, when I was originally ripping my DVDs to my computer I was using MactheRipper which was ripping the DVDs as video_ts files which front row could read within a Mac but not itunes. The way I looked at it was that I had an iPhone, an iPod, iTunes and a Apple TV and it seemed common sense to me the “do the work” and encode my DVDs/files to mp4/mv4 format so all these devices could read them with no compatibility issues at all. Having said that, you could buy this http://www.applecorellc.com/product_info.php?products_id=27 which is an add on for Apple TV that will allow Apple TV to play avi/divx files etc.. iTunes still wont be able to read them but if you’ve got an Apple TV, this will solve your problem…
#14
Peety → www.g33klite.com
Thanks Glen. The tip which I found to be helpful was, “moving iTunes Library to an external HDD.”
Therefore, many thanks for me and my HD ;)
#15
ZAMDid you say the process takes 3hrs to rip a dvd!!
Is there a way to cut ripping time — similar to cds?
Doesn’t it depend on your drives speed ?
What are some of the lates speeds for dvd drives?
Personally I do not think is worth while until they cut the time to rip a dvd to 15 to 25 minutes-
This is the reason that it was not until reasently that I put my cds on my conputer // Because now you can rips cds in about a minute or two.
Does anybody have any ways ripping dvs faster?
Thanks
#16
Stuart@ZAM - Yes if you want it as fast as CD’s then use an application called MacTheRipper which does what cd importing does as it just copies like for like the disc to your computer in roughly 20mins or so. The reason why it takes 3 hours to rip the way that we are talking about it because we are encoding the disc into a single digital file different to how the data is dipicted on the disc.
#17
Joe Jacobs → joejacobs.tumblr.com
Good post, but definitely leaves out a lot of information. There is so much more to creating a great digital media library, especially when coming to formats.
#18
Matt → www.themediacenterblog.com
@Neil and @Jack
You can now install XBMC as an add-in to the Apple TV which supports many formats such as DivX and the best part is it is free.
#19
AlanA much nicer and more comprehensive way of getting all the metadata tags into your ripped file it to use “metaX’. This will automatically retrieve all the data you could want and ad it to your ripped movie. I use it as the final stage of my ripping process just before adding it to iTunes ( which MetaX can do for you too).