Movies on the go

How do I take my movies with me?

This was a question from one of the readers of Macstarter. If you’re one of the millions of people who carry an iPhone, iPod, iPad or any number of devices, you’ll know how wonderful it is to be able to watch movies on the go. Whether in a plane, or a train (or in a doctor’s waiting room!) having a bunch of movies in your pocket is a great way of wasting some time.

But how do you get your movies onto your iDevice (or other device for that matter). For this job, you can spend huge amounts of money getting some kind of video converter. Or, in true Macstarter style you can simply download Handbrake. This makes my “must download” list every time.

Once you’ve downloaded Handbrake, start it up. Go to the top left, and click on the “Source” button. You can now choose whatever movie you want to put on your iwhatever. This can be a movie you’ve downloaded, or even a DVD from your collection. Once you have chosen your source, you can decided what to convert it to. Go to the top right of Handbrake and click on “Toggle Presets”.

From here you can choose what the movie will be shown on. You can now just press on the Start button (top left) and your movie will convert. You can also click on the “Add to Queue” button, and line up a number of movie files for conversion. Once you click on start, all your queued movies will be dealt with one by one.

Things to note: Depending on the size and number of the movies, this procedure can take a while to finish. I have on occasion queued up 10 - 15 movies and left Handbrake to do it’s work overnight. A great piece of software that just does what it does brilliantly.