I have (well, actually my Mac Mini has) been spending the last two weekends ripping DVDs -- using the excellent Handbrake. I use the time unit 'weekend' since it takes around 8-12 hours to extract and encode a two hour movie (if you use dual pass encoding - of which I'm not sure about the precise nature of its virtue but I'm erring on the side of quality and doing it anyway just because it sounds good). But despite the lengthy procees - about 2-3 movies per weekend, the results are nothing short of phenonmenal. I'm encoding them at a reasonably high bitrate ending up with H.264 encoded MP4 files of around 1GB each.

This is considerably higher than I'd need to encode them for regular viewing, but using the same principle that I used when encoding CDs a while back, encoding them at a higher bitrate is something I may curse today but I'll welcome tomorrow when disk capacity should be boundless in most respects. I never could work out why someone would encode their music collection at 128kbps when 192 or 256 would suffice.

Anyway, the movies. Among the movies I encoded this weekend including Batman Begins and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, of them all Sin City looks the most impressive in full screen playback on my 20" Apple display. Truly amazing for a gigabyte of zeroes and ones. Roll on the day when Apple release an Airport Express for MP4 movie playback.

Now I just need to stop swooning at random samples of it and watch the whole movie for the first time.