TechgnosisWeb ReBoot

So, I’ve been using Netflix for a few months now, and loving it. Incredible selection, relatively fast service (considering we’re on a tropical island), separate rental lists for the girlfriend and I, and no thrice-damned late fees. I may never set foot inside a Blockbuster’s again. However, not all is perfect: sometimes, I spend way too much time with a movie sitting atop the table, unwatched. No late fees is cool, but I’m paying a monthly fee for this! I need to get my money’s worth, and that means watching and returning movies on a reasonable timeframe.

Enter my current dillema: Buckaroo Banzai. This is one of those movies I’ve been meaning to see since damn near forever, but it’s also a prime example of why the girlfriend and I have separate rental queues; this isn’t exactly her idea of high cinema.

Banzai’s been sitting on the table next to the TV, unwatched, since early December. I keep meaning to watch it, but something always pops up, or I get distracted, or I’m just not in the mood to watch a movie at that moment. And so it remains unwatched, and unreturned, and the other movies and series in my queue are stuck there.

So I start thinking that it would be neat to be able to just take it with me and watch it at work on my lunch break, bit by bit, at my leisure. Unfortunately, I never did get around to puttig a DVD drive on my PC, so I didn’t think that was gonna happen. Then, I remembered the Mac: it has a DVD reader drive, right? One quick hunt online later, I’ve got a couple of free apps downloaded on the Mac that look like they’ll do the job: Handbrake and iSquint. Let’s rip.

Put the DVD in, kill DVD Player when it loads up, and bring up Handbrake. Wait for Handbrake to recognize the DVD… this takes longer than it should, but oh well. Once it’s all loaded up, I rip the movie to an AVI with MP3 audio. On my 1Ghz iMac with a measly 256 MB of RAM, this takes just about as long as the video itself, so about an hour and 42 minutes for Banzai. Once it’s done, I’ve got an ~850MB AVI file sitting on my desktop. Click it and it looks great: if I really wanted to, I could just archive a good chunk of my movies digitally like this and be quite happy with the quality. But we’re not done yet: that sucker’s way too big for little old Glitch. iSquint to the rescue. I was expecting more settings to it, but it’s only got two: iPod and TV. There are some advanced settings if you really want, but there’s not much to them. Luckily, iSight’s iPod settings work perfectly well on Glitch, at least if you use TCPMP to view the movie instead of the awful built-in media player. Re-encoding for Glitch takes about as long as the movie itself once more, so another hour and a half, but we end up with a ~200 MB MP4 file that fits snugly in Glitch’s SD memory card. I grab glitch, hit play, and it’s all good. A litle smaller than I’d like due to the Extreme Widescreen used in this movie, so there’s some larger-than-usual black bars on top and bottom, but perfectly watchable, nice and crisp.

And so that’s it. The Banzai DVD’s on it’s way back to Netflix, and I’m watching my movie comfortably during my downtimes wherever I may happen to be. I think I may have to do this more often. Note: yes, I know I could have skipped iSquint and probably encoded directly to Glitch-friendly format from Handbrake, but I’m not terribly well versed in MP4 encoding details, so I don’t know what bit-rate and other settings to use for good playback on a mobile device. iSquint takes care of that easily, and having to wait another hour and a half is nothing when you’ve got a Tauren Shaman to level up in WoW while you wait for the encoding to finish.

Technorati Tags: Netflix, Blockbuster, Buckaroo Banzai, Mac, Handbrake, iSquint, rip, DVD, video, MP4

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 14th, 2006 at 9:32 am and is filed under Technolust. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.