How to Convert DVD's for the Blackberry Storm
I have gone through a dozen pieces of freeware and countless different configuration settings with the goal of doing two key things:
- Easily converting DVDs to MP4 Format
- Cropping Wide Screen to Full Screen to best take advantage of the storms screen
Here's a few quick notes on what I have found, Handbrake is by far the easiest and most reliable of the video incoders/converters out there. Nero (7) was easy but the resulting video was a bit choppy, I do have to say that Nero recode was "Blazingly Quick"compared to Handbrake but I prefer quality. I tried several pieces of Free Software and my personal preference is handbrake. I would post the URL but do not have enough posts for the forum to allow me to.
As far as what setting to use: I have to thank other contributers of the Crackberry forums as they have posted most of the technical detail on what settings to use with other codec converters. I was able to apply these to Handbrake. The one setting I was on my own on was in converting Wide Screen to Full Screen (Yes, even with embedded black bars). When messing around with Nero decode I was able to figure out how to set up handbrake to do this correctly. Nero gives you a visual picture of a single frame that you can change the borders on and also gives you the settings for the four borders, which translate directly to handbrake!
One thing that I am not sure that handbrake will handle is the decryption. I use a commercial decryptor so was not able to verify whether Handbrake will decrypt or not. I use "anydvd" from slysoft. I believe I remember reading somewhere that it does but cannot verfy that (although I don't think that it will).
Below I will cover the settings you would want to use on Handbrake for three configurations, Wide screen, Full Screen and the one I had a hard time figuring out, Widescreen to Full screen.
There are some global configurations you we'll cover first.
- When you first open handbrake, Click on the "source" button on the upper right corner. You'll want to select the DVD VideoTS.
- On the column on the right hand side, Select "iphone and iphone Touch"
- Under Destination, select the location where you want to store the finished mp4 at.
- Right below where you selected the destination file and location there is a section called "Output settings" select "ipod 5g support" and make sure that the you change the format to "mp4 file"
Below the "output settings" section there are three tabs that you will be working with. They are "Picture Settings" "Video" and "Audio and subtitles". Below I'll explain the settings for each of these sections. Two of the sections, "Video" and "Audio and Subtitles" will remain the same for all three types of configurations you are shooting for, the "Pictre settings" tab will be diffrent depending on what the input picture is and what you want the output to be.
Here are the common settings for the "Video" and "audio and subtitles" tabs
Video:- Leave the video Codec at it's defualt (H.264)
- Set tehFramerate at 24FPS
- Check off (select) 2-pass encoding and Turbo firstpass
- Set the avg bit rate to 764. This will leave most movies at under 1Gbyte in lenght. If the quality is not good enough for you at this setting you can increase it (use multiplesof 16)likewise, if you would like to use less space on your MicroSD you can decrease this number
Audio and Subtitles:- Source = Automatic
- Audio Codec = AAC
- Mixdown I use the Dolby pro Logic II even though it uses slightly more disc space but you can use the stereo setting as well
- Sample rate = 44.1
- bitrate = 64
Picture Settings:
For Widescreen to Widescreen
- crop = automatic
- Size : Anamorphic = None; Width/Height = 480x272
- Filters = default (no filters selected)
For Fullscreen to Fullscreen
- crop = automatic
- Size : Anamorphic = None; Width/Height = 480x340
- Filters = default (no filters selected)
For Fullscreen to Widescreen
Contrary to other postings I have seen here and at other forums this can be done! Here's how.
- crop = Custom. Here's an interesting point. Handbrake is smart enough to automatically crop the black bars at teh top and bottom of the picture this will give you a setting of "60" for the top and "62" for the bottom. It's the sides that are the trick. I initially tried 90 on both left and right. Thatgave me a good picture with a smudge of a black line on the left and on the right. When I tried it again I used 85 on both sides and got a (to me) perfect picture!
Top=60; Bottom=62; Left=85; Right=85
- Size : Anamorphic = None; Width/Height = 480x340
- Filters = default (no filters selected)
Click on the start button and Handbrake will open a command line window where you can follow theprogress (dont close it as it will halt the encoding process). It takes my PC several hour to do one movie but the results are worth it. Let me know how this works out for you!