What is handbrake?

At home I've been considering building a Home Theater PC (HTPC). During my research I've seen a lot of talk about a program called Handbrake and other related programs such as DVD rippers, DVD encoding, DVD burning, DVD playback, etc. I had a hard time understanding all this initially, but I think I've finally got my head around all this. I wanted to share it with others in the hopes that it helps.

I want to start at the opposite end from Handbrake, with the DVD player software. Two of my favorite media players are Media Player Classic Home Cinema and VLC. There are tons of other players out there, but these programs are two of the best. They are small, fast, and (most importantly to me) they have a clean simple interface. They are also powerful and they play every format I've thrown at them.

Ok, if you insert a DVD into your computer, start MPC or VLC, and select "play disc" it will begin playing the DVD. You can also use MPC / VLC and browse to the DVD drive where you'll see tons of VOB files. If you select one of these VOB files it will begin playing that video. DVDs store the video as a series of VOB files on the disc. So far everything is as expected.

Now let's say you want to watch the DVD without the disc. Why would you want to do that you ask? One good example is my laptop at home does not have an optical drive of any type. So I cannot watch a DVD on my laptop. So let's use Windows Explorer and copy all the files on the DVD onto a hard drive. If we use MPC / VLC to open the folder it will begin playing the movie, but the movie is all scrambled and unwatchable. If you open a single VOB file from the hard drive, again the video plays but it is scrambled. What happened? It plays from the disc but not from the identical copy made on the hard drive. The answer is copy protection. The disc is encoded in such a way that it only works if you play from the original source.

It turns out there is a way around this problem. You need to run software that enables you to copy the disc. I've found tons of programs that do this; DVD43, DVDShrink, DVDDecrypter, and DVDFab are four free programs I've found. If you use one of these programs to copy the disc to your hard drive, you can now open the files using MPC / VLC and it will play correctly.

Some of these programs appear to do more than just enable file copying. For example, DVDShrink allows you to remove menus, title screens, subtitles, foreign language audio tracks, etc. to reduce the size of the files.

I realize I haven't mentioned anything about Handbrake, which is the thing that started this thread. Why are so many people talking about Handbrake, especially since I just showed you how to copy DVDs and handbrake wasn't involved? It turns out Handbrake is a converter. Basically it converts the VOB files into an MP4 file. The main reason someone would want to do this is because not all devices have a VOB player. Apply iPod, iPhone, iPad, Microsoft XBox 360, etc. are all devices that don't play VOB files but they do play MP4 files. So Handbrake converts the video so that you can watch it on your iPad, XBox 360, etc. I should point out, converting the video will result in a loss of quality, so if you're planning on watching on your PC don't use Handbrake unless you need to compress the video to reduce its size.