HandBrake: How to convert VOB to AVI, MP4, M4V

A client recently sent me a DVD with some clips they wanted for their Website. It had been a while since I converted DVD video for the web, and before I’d been using AVS Video Converter, which is a really simple $49 shareware app that works great and supports a ton of video file formats.

For this project, though, I happened to be on my laptop and didn’t feel like spending any money, so I figured I’d see what free open-source video conversion tools were out there.

Well, I just discovered the best free video converter for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux and I must say, it is truly impressive. It is called HandBrake. HandBrake is a GPL-Licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder. I tested version 0.9.3 on Windows XP.

HandBrake converts video from VOB and nearly every other source file format to a handful of modern codecs, including AVI, MP4, M4V, MKV, and OGM. It reads DVDs and outputs digital video files you can playback in Windows Media Player, DiVX Player or QuickTime Movie Player with just a few clicks. You can set up multiple video files to convert in a queue and process a batch of video clips without babysitting your box.

It has built-in presets for QuickTime H.264, iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and Apple TV, both legacy and newer formats. It has high profile conversion presets for animation, constant quality bit rate, film and television. It also has presets for gaming consoles, PSP, PS3 and Xbox 360.

The HandBrake GUI on Windows XP

You can fine-tune any preset with the advanced settings – and there’s a ton of them on 6 different tabs from the main interface.

You can crop the source and resize. You can detelecine, decomb, deinterlace, denoise and deblock. You can change the aspect ratio and go from non-square to square pixels and vice-versa. You can do video and audio together or separately. You can select fom multiple audio tracks and use AC3 or MP3 audio.

All the settings you define for a video conversion job can be named and saved for later, and what’s more, you can see the command line parameters you’re actually setting up by generating the output to the query editor. You can then use the generated query via the command line interface to the tool to use in .bat files, AppleScript, or even from a PHP or Python application via CLI.

Overall, this software is truly an awesome piece of work and it seems like the perfect freeware for all your video conversion needs.