Windows Guide to formatting DVD movies for iPods

A free article on Arts and Entertainment

By: David B Smith

Far and wide ordinary people have discovered that they can get their DVD movies onto their new video iPod without charge. How do they do that? It's easy actually. In actual fact, if you have copied a movie onto the PSP before, you most likely already know how to get your DVDs loaded into your iPod. The transfer process is not very dissimilar at all, and all you require is some good DVD-to-iPod-Video converter software.

In our first illustration we'll use Cucusoft's iPod Video Converter + DVD to iPod Converter suite. The Cucusoft platform is a terrific video format converter, and has the following features:

* Rip DVD to iPod video straight (no need to convert DVD to AVI or VOB first)

* Convert AVI, WMV, MPEG, RM, RMVB, ASF, MOV, DIVX, XVID, MPG to iPod MP4 or H264 format

* Easy-to-use and fast conversion

* Can also rip DVD to AVI, DivX, VCD, SVCD, and MPEG

Here's the procedure, in easy to follow steps:

1. Download the iPod Video Converter + DVD to iPod Converter suite

Visit GoRipper.com to obtain the program file for the software suite. Once there, go to the Downloads section and stick to the download instructions on the page that shows on the page. Keep the window open as the file downloads. Afterwards, install and run.

2. Load your DVD

Cucusoft's iPod Video Converter Suite has a well-ordered, blue user interface that is intuitively appealing and user friendly. There should be a series of three buttons to the right of the interface that are labelled:

* 'Video to iPod'

*'DVD to iPod', and

* 'Quit' (for quitting the program).

Click 'DVD to iPod' converter factor before loading your DVD.

To load your DVD, then click the 'Open DVD' button or choose 'Open DVD' from the 'File' drop down menu.

After loading, quite a few titles will materialize on the list.

Here's a tip: If you want to rip chapters or segments you like, you can also choose 'Open VOB or Mpeg' or 'Open' from the 'File' menu.

3. Select your Files.

The main file of the video should be the lengthiest heading. If you don't want to convert the other titles (usually the special features in your DVD), you can remove them by selecting that particular label, right-clicking and 'Remove'.

4. Save your Video Files

At the lowermost portion of the list of chapter titles, you will see many more options. Look for the one that says 'Subtitle' beside a drop down menu box. Click on the arrow down radio button to set the 'Subtitle' to what you like. To 'Output Folder', type the complete path name or opt for the path where you want to save your video files by clicking 'Output Folder'.

5. Convert to Video iPod format

To start ripping DVD to iPod video files, just click on the huge circular 'Convert' button at the lower right side of the user interface. You do not need to set 'Input settings' and 'Output settings'.

Of course, the Cucusoft way is merely one way of doing it. If you find that converting DVDs to iPod using Cucusoft's suite is too tedious, check out the alternatives. There are several video-conversion suites on offer and the catalog is building.

If you're mechanically gifted, there is certainly software on hand that gives you more options over the conversion procedure than the Cucusoft suite, but if you consider you have got more important things to do than study video codecs and bitrates, the effortlessness of the Cucusoft solution makes it very attractive.