HiTechHall’s Tech Waves

While showing a DVD in class, or watching one at home, have you ever wondered if it might be possible to put those movies and video segments on the hard drive of your computer? Well, many of you probably haven’t; you’ve got plenty of other important things to ponder! But I bet at least a few you have thought about the advantages of doing this: You teachers are called “geeks.” And to you, I present HandBrake.

This free download allows you to “rip” DVD/CD content and put it on your hard drive. It then allows you to “compress” that video into a variety of formats, such as .mp4, aka MPEG-4. This popular format is the one that iTunes requires to play video on iPods, iPhones, etc.

As a teacher, there may be some real advantages to ripping your DVDs to a hard drive. Say you had an extensive collection of DVDs and you wanted to make it easier to sort through and carry it. You could rip all of your discs to your laptop or external hard drive, and store them there on that one compact device.  If you wanted to go a step further, you could compress each video to .mp4 and then drag it into iTunes. From there, you could sync it with your video iPod. Then bring your iPod to school, plug it into your school computer or projector and show the video to your class. This is just one idea, and I’m sure you can think of many more.

As you might imagine, there are some legal gray-areas here. For example, no one anywhere is in agreement that it’s ok to rip a commercial DVD so that you can watch it on your iPod or computer, or show that content to your students. But most of my sources in the tech world seem to think it’s fine; people should have the right to view the content they paid for through whatever medium they choose. (My sources are not DVD producers, movie-production companies, etc.) In any case… I’m just the messenger.

My next project is to rip a bunch of old home movies that a few years ago I converted from Super-8 film to DVD. I’d like to be able to upload these films to my YouTube channel, and enable the sharing of them with family members scattered around the world. HandBrake is the perfect tool for the job.

HandBrake works on both Mac and PC, and here’s an article from Wired with more info about it.