From Super 8 to Handbrake

One of the things I find terrific about being alive today is that we can actually see what people whom are no longer in their prime or have passed away, were actually like. Not just movie stars, but old documentary footage of leaders such as Churchill and Kennedy. We also get to see old home movies. Contrast this with my grandparents who, if they were lucky, only had an oil painting to go on.

But to the point of this week’s post. My wife’s parents found a whole lot of old Super 8 movies that they had taken in the late 60s, early 70s.

They decided that it would be a really good idea to get them converted to DVD before they deteriorated much more. Apparently the pitch is that DVD will last for at least 100 years whilst their Super 8 film was getting nasty 35 year later.

Watching these silent movies from the past was of course fascinating, and sometimes just plain weird (note: is it okay to find my wife attractive when she was just 14?). My wife then mentioned that there was only this one lot of DVDs and we had to pass them over to another sibling when we were finished with them. This of course struck me as odd, and before I knew it, out of my mouth came: “Do you want me to make a copy?”. Faced with big teary eyes and a “would you?” I couldn’t resist. Despite the fact I had no experience ripping a DVD.

You see, DVDs don’t just contain one file like an AVI or MPEG movie file. They contain a whole hierarchy of folders, with the top (root) directory normally called VIDEO_TS. Video and audio tracks are kept separately, because amongst other reasons, there may be more than one language audio track. So whilst copying a file is simple, ripping involves merging audio and video files back together, encoding them and creating an output that is a useful single file called something like myvideo.avi or myvideo.mov.

The payoff is that once I had ripped the DVD, I would have a digital copy on a hard disk which was no longer locked into the medium and could last forever. Because this was a once-off for me, I decided to find out what free software was available that I could acquire and test without paying a cent. I typed into Google “Open Source DVD ripping” and came up with a huge variety of offerings. I was looking for software for Windows (there are plenty of offerings for unix and mac out there as well) and noticed I seemed to get plenty of hits on a product called Handbrake.

Handbrake is hosted in France but the website and software is all in English. The software appeared to do the job being available for Windows, designed to rip DVDs and could output in a variety of formats, including avi and mpeg. It also seemed to be reasonably current, as updates for it had been released this year. And as open source it was free to download the software. I then did a Google search on “Handbrake DVD ripping” to see what other people were saying about Handbrake. Happily it seemed to be the goods so I downloaded a copy. It was a small download (6.3MB) for the version with an easy to use GUI (GUI = a pretty Graphic User Interface, CLI = text only Command Line Interface).

It was also easy to operate with an idiot mode.
1. Select the source: The VIDEO_TS directory on the DVD in my disk drive.
2. Set the output location: A new file called Super8.avi on my desktop.
3. Confirm the file format you want: In my case I wanted avi.
4. Press the start button.

It appeared to take around 45 minutes to rip an hour and a half worth of movies.

The result? Brownie points for me. And since my parents in-law owned the copyright on the film, there were no copyright issues for me. I am now going to start on my catalogue of video recordings I have made at work (stored on DVD) so that they can live forever as well.

Brendan Lewis is a serial technology entrepreneur having founded : Ideas Lighting, Carradale Media, Edion, Verve IT, The Churchill Club, Flinders Pacific and L2i Technology Advisory. He has set up businesses for others in Romania, Indonesia and Vietnam. Qualified in IT and Accounting, he has also spent time running an Advertising agency and as a Cavalry Officer with the Australian Army Reserve.

To read more Brendan Lewis blogs, click here.