Many folks use their hard drive to store their music. Transforming the desktop into a “digital jukebox” is great for organizing a collection, transferring to a portable music player, and listening whether from the desktop itself, or from an evolving category of device- the media extender. At the cornerstone of all of this is the ability to compress music to a small digital format, most commonly the mp3, through a variety of software programs.

While this process is well worked out for audio, it’s a different story for video. While the allure is the same, namely of having all your videos in one location, easily transferred and viewed is clearly there, the software solutions are not nearly as mature. Add in the difficulty of different video codecs, with their compatibility issues, and it can become a little daunting and lead you back to the safety of the original DVD discs.

While no format is as universal for video as mp3’s are for audio, one does come close. The DivX format is an open format, that does offer a reasonable trade off of compression and file size. We should recall that even with today’s cavernous hard drives, a large pile of DVD’s can fill up any of them without compression. Unfortunately though, we must realize that while the DivX format will work for playing on the desktop, only a minority of media extenders, and just about no portable media players can play back the format natively without some serious transcoding which requires serious computer horsepower for compression, and will result in a loss of quality.

Sometimes you find something when you’re not looking for it. That’s the case with the freeware project Handbrake that I stumbled upon looking for something else. This is a program, available for many operating systems, that promises to convert a DVD to the DivX format. It is a purpose built compressor that can convert a DVD into a DivX file.

Handbrake has a lot of flexibility that also makes it a little daunting to use. It also helps if you plan out what will eventually be done with it because there’s no use in specifying a much higher resolution than the file will ever be viewed at. The user needs to select the exact pixel resolution of the file to be outputted. Those looking for a one click wizard will be disappointed as there is none. There are some guidelines on their website, but even this gets confusing.

With some settings chosen, I fired up Handbrake and gave it a go. The program was run on my Shuttle Athlon X2 5200+ with a gig of RAM. It took over one hour to convert the movie from a dual layer disc to the DivX file. The resulting file was one DivX file which played smoothly with good audio. The file size outputted to one gig, which is an eight to one reduction roughly, although I chose to only convert the movie, and not any coming attractions or bonus features. Watching the film, it is of acceptable quality, but no one is going to mistake it for the original as the quality did take a hit. Then again, I viewed it on my 19” LCD with a resolution of 1280 x 1024 that even uncompressed DVD’s sometimes don’t look that great.

If you’d like to create a video jukebox on your desktop, Handbrake is a great program that is worth putting in the effort to get familiar with.

–Jonas

More info, including the download.