Movies in iTunes 6

I don't know about you, but I've always wanted to have my favorite movies on my Powerbook so I could watch them wherever I was whenever I wanted. I tried using Handbrake to rip a Mpeg4 it worked but I couldn't play the movie fullscreen. (I'm not going to pay $30 for QTpro.) What I ended up doing was ripping the DVD with MacTheRipper and just leaving the files in my Movies folder. Then I'd open DVD Player and "Open DVD media..." that worked like a charm, it was like having the DVD in the drive. The downside was that the DVD files were 4-8 GB depending on the movie!! That stunk, but that's how it had to be done...

...Until iTunes 6.

With the introduction of video playback iTunes was the perfect candidate for what I wanted to do because it plays QT video fullscreen. Right now I have several of my (or my family's) favorite movies stored in iTunes, attractively displayed (very important!) and taking up less space then a single DVD copy from MTR. I'm a happy camper. Here's what I do:

First I rip the dvd using the afore mentioned MacTheRipper. I do a full disc extraction and dump the files in my "movies" folder. Next I use Handbrake to encode the main feature (and/or animated short) into H.264. The quality is great as good (if not better) then when I play from a DVD. (I keep the resolution and fps the same as the source and use 2-pass encoding.) When thats all done I drag the resulting file to my iTunes library and give it a proper name, artwork etc. Here is a screenshot of some of the movies in my iTunes.

I find that iTunes does a fairly good job of managing these movies for me. It can even be set to remember my playback position. (Select the movie, press Apple+I click "option" and check the "remember playback position" box.) As for size "Robots" is about 700MB while "Master and Commander" is about 1GB. That's pretty big still but nothing compared to the 7GB DVD copies, and the quality is just as good.