Ripping A DVD To My Apple 3G iPhone

One of my favorite forms of entertainment has always been movies and even though I have had a 3^rd generation Apple iPod Nano for a while now I have not really thought about loading a movie on to it only to watch it on a 2” screen. Sure the screen is one of the clearest in Apple’s product line-up for its size, but still 2” screen is pretty small. Then the Apple 3G iPhone was released to us Canadians.

Widescreen Or Bust

I have always been one of those people who have bought widescreen movies and have tried to convince people to buy widescreen over the 4:3 aspect which crops the picture and you lose portions of the scene. I was happy to hear that when the first generation iPhone was released that it would support the widescreen ratio and with the release of the 2^nd generation 3G iPhone and its 3.5” display I thought it might be time to load a movie or two on to it. After all 3.5” diagonally in a widescreen format is much nicer than a 4:3 format on a 2” screen right?

DVD to MP4 to iPhone Using Windows

Now how does one convert your DVD movie into the format needed to sync to your iPhone from iTunes? Well I looked over a couple of programs and the only ones I have been able to get to work properly without buggering up the quality has been a combination of using DVD Decrypter and another application called iPhone Video Converter.

One word of warning, the movies I upload to my Apple 3G iPhone I do own. Using illegally gotten movies is not recommended and it seems like there also might be issues now loading movies and/or songs to your portable devices too, but I don’t feel like looking further into that issue.

Instructions

I thought about doing a tutorial on how to properly rip a DVD to your iPhone but I thought it would be pretty much ‘reinventing the wheel’ and I did not want to just repeat someone else’s website from which I found the best instructions. If you download the above two tools and follow the instructions from the Sheer Boredom website you should be able to enjoy your movies on your iPhone.

The Ripping Experience

It took me a while but using the above instructions I was able to rip a DVD (in my case Minority Report) to my Apple 3G iPhone for the first time successfully. Other attempts failed with some weird issue when I went to ‘sync’ the movie from iTunes. At about 20% of the way though the sync my computer would hang and reboot. I am unsure why my Vista machine would reboot but perhaps the two video files I previously attempted to create were somehow corrupt.

The one thing I did not like with iTunes and my iPhone in regards to movies was that I could not just ‘drag and drop’ the movie file onto the phone. I had to go into the properties of the iPhone, select Movies and then enable the ‘Sync’ option for movies in order to transfer the file. I would have thought just dragging and dropping the movie file would have sufficed but I guess I was wrong.

Finally after about 2 hours I successfully ripped my first DVD onto my iPhone, granted it took up 1.6GB of space but the quality of both the video and the audio is remarkable. People around me that I have shown this to cannot believe a cell phone has the capability of such a feat. Though I am not sure if I would rip any more movies onto my iPhone as I just noticed that on my 8GB iPhone I only have about 6GB to play with so that only leaves enough room for 5 or so movies. Then again I did not think I would want the 16GB iPhone but I doubt I will watch movies very often on it either.

Have you had a chance to rip movies onto your iPhone yet? What about your iPod Nano? What about ripping a DVD to another personal media player you might own that is not of the Apple brand?