Got a DVD? Got a Mac? Got an iPod or PSP? Get Instant Handbrake

By Stephen Munn | September 2, 2008

I got one of those newish PSP Slim & Lite systems not too long ago and picked up a couple of games to play. I like my PSP, and it feels very open, which has actually been part of what’s made it so difficult for the system to thrive: piracy is easy. But let’s not talk about piracy right now, let’s talk about fair use: watching your DVD movies on your PSP. You’d think something like this would be easy, but you’d be wrong, at least when you first try to do it and realize how freaking picky the PSP is with its video. In Windows, there’s an application that’s available called PSP Video but Paul tells me that even that application doesn’t work 100% of the time. Sony’s own Media Manager is also around, but that doesn’t rip from DVD for obvious reasons.

I don’t really use my Windows machine anymore, having made the Switch(tm) some time ago. I’ve become accustomed to the handful of free and disgustingly powerful applications there are for Mac that let you rip video right off of DVDs into whatever format you could want. This is part of what’s been so frustrating for me with the PSP. One of the programs I use is Handbrake, an application that’s also available for Windows. The app has presets in the more recent versions, so you can just pop in the DVD, select your track, select a preset, select a filename, and hit go. Unfortunately, even Handbrake’s PSP preset doesn’t seem capable of producing a PSP-compatible video file. I looked on some message boards and found I’m not the only person with this problem, but even the solutions that worked for others did not work for me.

Somewhere, I saw someone mention something called Instant Handbrake. Wondering what that could be, I looked it up, and it turns out Instant Handbrake is a pared-down version of Handbrake with very few options.

Point it at your DVD and wait for a list of tracks. Check the ones you want. Choose PSP or iPod format. Specify whether you want the image cropped to fill the aspect of the device. Select the language for the audio and the subtitles, and hit go. It proceeds to quickly rip the tracks off your DVD into a format that will play on your device. Very, very easy… and more importantly, it actually works.

I can’t tell you how many DVDs I have that I never have time to watch at home. That’s one problem down. Now how do I convert the Gamecube games I never completed to run on my PSP?

Source: Handbrake and Instant Handbrake. Note that Handbrake’s newest version won’t run in Tiger, but Instant Handbrake does because it’s pretty old.