Friday Finds #12: Handbrake!

Today is my LAST Friday Finds! And it is only appropriate that I bring you a last minute freebie! This is a cool and FREE gadget that anyone giving an ipod as a Christmas gift will want to know about. It's called HandBrake. Actually, I'm pretty sure many already know about this, but for those that don't... HandBrake is an "open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows."

In my lingo: pop a DVD in, use HandBrake and transform it into an MP4 to upload onto the iPod.
In HandBrake lingo: It will turn any DVD-like source (VIDEO_TS folder, DVD image or real DVD and some .VOB and .TS files) and most any multimedia file it can get libavformat to read and libavcodec to decode and convert it the following outputs:

1. File format: MP4, MKV, AVI or OGM
2. Video: MPEG-4, H.264, or Theora (1 or 2 passes or constant quantizer/rate
encoding)
3. Audio: AAC, MP3, Vorbis or AC-3 pass-through (supports encoding of several
audio tracks)

My techie friend mentioned this to me -- and it is so cool I almost want to go out and get an iPod. Well, I do, and maybe I will after Christmas. Ya never know! (p.s.-check out my techie friend's post about Santa... pretty good stuff!)

Now -- can anyone explaine what a quantizer? It sorta looks like it is spelled wrong, but I cut and pasted it from their web site! Oh, well...


Oh, yeah -- I finally changed my blog from my FALL look to my WINTER look... 6 days before Christmas. I'm right on top of things!