Precise definitions of legality vary from country to country. Please don't generalise - it isn't helpful.

That's why it's impossible to find Handbrake anywhere except on really seedy back alley type websites you have to know the secret handshake to read, right?

I really, REALLY wish we could have just ONE post without the "oooooh, that's SO illegal!" malarkey. Nobody's going to jail for using Handbrake.

No, no one will go to jail. But I think it's annoying that everyone has to live under the constant (if not necessarily entirely realistic) fear of "you're doing something illegal." I would prefer to change laws rather than evade them. While there may be no tangible consequences, there is a higher standard.

It depends on the type of machine you have and what settings you use. I've got a variety of machines at work and home. I rip DVDs to play on the Mac mini I've got hooked up to my TV, so I rip at full size and 1500 kbps. With my 2 GHz dual-core MacBook, I can rip an average (~100 minute) DVD in about an hour or so, using single-pass MP4. Single-pass H264 takes about twice as long, and two-pass encoding takes twice as long again. My dual-2.0 G5 takes about twice as long as the Intel for any task, and my dual-1.25 GHz MDD G4 takes twice as long as the G5. I've ripped some TV shows for my iPod (320x240, 400 kbps) as 2-pass H264 and it'll take a whole workday to rip one disk (5 or 6 24-minute episodes.)

I've done some tests and H264 looks better than MP4 and two-pass looks better than one pass, though for the most part, you really can't tell too much when casually watching--you've got to open them side-by-side in QuickTime and then go frame-by-frame to really see the differences. But for anything I plan to keep, I always try to rip at 2-pass H264. Time to encode really isn't an issue--I just let it run on a machine that isn't doing anything else at the time. (The 'getting the batmobile' scene (chapter) in Batman Begins is a good test--well-lit, lots of motion.)

Surprisingly, my 4-way 2.66 GHz Mac Pro is not a lot faster than the dual-core MacBook. HandBrake will peg both CPUs at 100% on any two-cpu/two-core Mac I have, but on the quad, all four cores run at about 60-70% each.

In totally unrelated news, you might be surprised at the selection of DVDs available for free at your local public library. :-)

~ROFL~
That was great. I actually used handbrake to watch movies on my phone back in '04 when I had a Motorola V710. That phone was the shiiiit in its day. I used to sell phones. I compressed Top Gun to 15fps and scaled the frame size down to the size of that screen and saved it as 3GP compliant MPEG-4 video. The entire movie fit on a 512MB transflash card and playback was pristine. I sold more of those phones when I showed my customers what this thing was capable of.

I'm using a 1GHz G4 Powerbook which is much older than what many have mentioned you're using but it still takes Handbrake 3x as long as Instant Handbrake to rip the same DVD. Thanks everyone for the suggestions to turn off 2-pass encoding and H.264. I'll have to try that tonight and tweak some of the other settings to see if it speeds the process up a little bit.

Matt, turning off second pass is going to hurt the quality of the final encode. The more wizbang features you turn on in H.264 the smaller the size will be (or better picture if you're limiting my bitrate). The downside is the extra features take longer to encode.

Personally I use CRF anamophic encodes with ac3 passthrough so that is one pass but using a constant quality (not caring so much about bitrate). It works very nicely on my Touch and AppleTV. My settings are roughly transparent (ie, look as nice as the DVD) and encoding on a dual core athlon x2 takes 3-4 hours.

Also, are you ripping directly from the DVD? If so, you might try searching for the latest version of MacTheRipper and use that to rip the movie. Then point HB at the VIDEO_TS folder and let it do its thing.

This is a good point - HandBrake does subs where no other application (that I'm aware of) does. I think Tyler's talked about it a little for VisualHub (and if you're reading, dude, I'll throw in my request for such a feature) but it's one of those oft-requested but not immediately practical features.

As for FBI raids, I don't think anyone has to worry about that. As I said before, nobody's going to jail for using HandBrake, and nobody has to worry about FBI raids unless they're doing something actually illegal, like downloading kiddie porn.

The police have better things to do with their time than enforce bogus laws designed to protect Hollywood's revenue streams.

On the Handbrake forums, the developers specifically tell people to use MactheRipper to put the dvd on your hard drive and then use Handbrake. It's much faster, and it doesn't put as much wear on your DVD drive.

Instant Handbrake is a fork of the main codebase that has never been officially supported by the makers of Handbrake. Handbrake now has presets for most devices.

The developers on the handbake forums always say that any conversion requires a tradeoff between quality, file size, and conversion speed. If you care about speed there are a number of things you can do...

1. Turn off two pass encoding
2. Use Mpeg instead of H.264 and bump up the bit rate by about 500. iPods support higher bit rates (2500bps) and pixels (307200 pixels) for MPeg than H.264. I believe those numbers are even higher for current generation devices.

Mac the Ripper and any of the following are what I use to get my iPod loaded with DVD movies:

1. Handbrake - Oldy but goody (sometimes too many options for people that don't know what their doing.) Seems to work whenever one of the other two programs I listed doesn't quite do the job. Because of lack of support for the Elgato Turbo.264 Now I ONLY use Handbrake if one of these other two programs does not do the job first.

2. Roxio Popcorn 3 - This proggie was MADE to burn DVD movies and also compress them to iPod videos. No subtitle support but then again I've never needed it. That's what headphones are for, right? I love that this program will take advantage of the Elgato Turbo.264 Hardware H.264 encoder if you have one. Popcorn 3 does not compress everything however and sometimes you have to use one of the other programs I listed.

3. Elgato Turbo.264 includes its own encoder program which I believe to be faster at encoding than Popcorn 3 with the hardware acceleration turned on. The only reason I don't use it for everything is certain DVDs will not compress right, and you will have to use one of the other programs I listed to get it to compress correctly.