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Fed up with googling this as all I get is adverts for people selling possibly dubious not quite freeware. As per the title, my kids have kindle fires which we’d like to fill up with their DVD collections. I’ve tried handbrake but that didn’t work properly. What should I use to do the conversion and what setting/format works best? They’re not too bothered about quality, so long as sound is in sync and it’s not randomly blocky.
Edit: don’t mind spending some cash on proper software to do this.
Handbrake was always my go to for transcoding. I have used it successfully to do exactly what you want it to do.
Why didn’t it work?
Output came out very blocky and out of sequence with the audio.
Handbrake has always worked for me. Stick it all on an SD card and install VLC to play it.
I ripped all my DVDs - I used Ripit (now defunct I think) and Handbrake - but it was eons ago.
Take a look at "make MKV", I think that will rip your disk and spit-out an MKV
MKVs are pretty universal - don't know if they will play on a kindle though...... in which case you can use something like Subler to convert them into Mp4s. Subler is deceptively simple - you just drag the files into the queue and press "go".
If you want to reduce the file size, you might be better off going with Handbrake than Subler - its very versatile, but the settings can be confusing. It does have lots of presets though - one for and amazon fire (@720p 30fps), just use that.
Agree with the above comments on Handbrake, it shoud be what you need.
It may be a case that your disks have CSS protection? If that's the case you may need to run them through DVD Decrypter first as I'm not sure whether handbrake can break the encryption itself.
Also, I seem to remember needing to change the preset on handbrake to match the aspect ratio and frame rate of a DVD as the default doesn't match (or something, it was a while ago).
Reading that again, it'd be a lot easier if there was a 'one click' solution, which I don't think handbrake is really.
edit: It appears that you can do some fettling to enable handbrake to deal with CSS and that site give a handy step-by-step guide to go from DVD - video file using handbrake.
If you have a few DVDs worth to do, it's definitely worth separating-out the "ripping" and "transcoding/conversion" steps - that will allow you to queue-up the files for handbrake and leave it running overnight. Otherwise you'll be back and forwards feeding in DVDs the whole time.
Just pointing out an alternative:
it would probably be far quicker/easier just to torrent the shows in whatever format you want them. If you already own the DVDs, I don't see an ethical issue here - but you may feel differently.
If you do go down that route, just make sure you sign-up to a decent VPN (pretty cheap for a month). Not advocating for this approach - but it's probably the simplest way to achieve what you want.
Been down this road with our Kindle fire for the boys. Quickest way to do it is to pirate stuff and use torrents. Unpopular opinion but buying a usb dvd rom drive and burning a 7 disc Peppa pig collection is super slow compared to fibre and pirate bay.
I've paid for it once so I don't care. I've done the same with CDs. Can't find it on Spotify? No way I'm pulling out one of many suitcases from the garage down the bottom of garden, routing and finding that obscure cd. I'll just torrent it.
I used to always use Handbrake, but since switching to Win10 it doesn't seem to work.
I spent age fiddling around & did manage to get it to rip a file but within the DVDs I tried, I couldn't find the correct file.
It used to be pretty easy to look at the files available, choose the first long one & generally that was the correct one. But the last few I've tried it hasn't been the case, with some of the DVDs ending up with >10 file options of exactly the same length & having chosen several of those & not getting a result (film & audio, but completely out of order & chopped up) I gave up.
I'm not sure if that's Handbrake not working properly, or the film producer trying to make it hard to rip films by sticking in loads of junk onto the disk.
Just got back from our holiday. The fires worked well. The actual process I used was this:
If the DVD had copy protection, then I ripped it with MakeMKV and then transcoded it with handbrake to mp4 format in the right resolution. Otherwise I was able to use handbrake directly.
Thanks for the responses.
I found it easier to just use Netflix or prime video and let them download a stack of movies before we went away 🙂
Too time consuming to rip/transcode dvds ime