handbrake, dvds and the iPhone

got myself an iPhone after the price drop and a recent promotion/raise. didn't get it for video really (it can't even record video) but it's nice to see what it's capable of...

a friend of mine bought this portable media player device. 160 gig hard drive, something like a 3 or 4" screen. and at a great price.

he was asking me about ripping dvds into a compatible format so i mentioned mencoder for linux or handbrake for the mac (he's considering moving from linux with occasional dual boots into windows to a mac).

he struggled with getting a simple-ish solution on windows but finally found a two step rip/transcode type of process that worked.

well, after a long-ass day of work i decided to see if HandBrake might have been updated with easy iPhone support. sure enough...

popped in a dvd, launched HandBrake, chose Update Built-in Presets from the presets tools menu-thingy (i had an earlier version so my old pre-0.9 presets were there), chose iPhone and ripped it. synced it in iTunes and voila! easy-peasy.

this is definitely a mac success story...

p.s. you can customize HandBrake all you want. make your own presets (for mpeg-4 or h.264) for non-apple media players, etc.