tonyballinger.com

I love my iPod, but to be honest the video capabilities have very little to do with it. The idea of paying $2 per show to watch TV programs on 2″ screen is pretty underwhelming. However, there are those rare occasions when having a bit of video on your iPod can come in handy when you need to kill time. Long train rides, for example.

For converting video DVDs for use on your video iPod, Handbrake has a great (and free) tool available. But converting DVDs was a bit of a pain if you wanted your widescreen video to show full frame on your iPod. At home on the HDTV, I prefer widescreen. But when I don’t have much screen to work with, I prefer full frame. And with Handbrake, you had to go in manually and set how much to crop off of each side while maintaining the proper aspect ratio.

Now there’s Instant Handbrake, which reduces creating DVD videos for your iPod to simple process. On selecting a DVD, you are presented with simple options: which tracks to extract, what format for the extracted video, whether to use widescreen or full frame, and your preferred language for audio and subtitles (if desired).

I’m not sure if Instant Handbrake means I’ll be watching any more video on my iPod than I do currently, but at least it will be a bit easier if I do.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 4th, 2006 at 5:11 pm and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.