Apple Otaku

I briefly talked about HandBrake in a previous post. It’s an easy to use DVD ripper and encoder. But for the beginner, picking the right settings can be a confusing process.

Here are my settings: I choose the normal preset and simply change the audio settings. I change the sample rate to 44.1 khz and the bitrate to 128 kbps. My goal is to output a high-quality video file that can work well on the Apple TV but at the same time keep the file size to 2GB or less.

Using the above settings, the average two-hour movie takes up less than 1.5GB of hard disk space. I think these settings pretty closely mirror the video files you get from the iTunes Store. So if you’re happy with the quality of the iTunes Store video files, then the settings I just described should work well for you.

If you’re not happy with the video quality, you can increase the video bitrate. Some people prefer to raise the bitrate to 1800 kbps.

Do you have any HandBrake settings that you’d like to share?

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