Hi all, this type of area i have no idea so i need some help.
I have a couple of dvds that i would like to put onto my apple tv. Now i have mac the ripper to get the content off the dvd which works fine. But handbrake i have no idea how to use. I no that it has presets but which preset are you using?
there is legacy which has the Appletv legacy and under Apple it has Apple TV
What is the difference? I have tried both appletv legacy / apple tv and i am getting like a 4:3 display on my tv and it also has artifacts and the picture turns funny colours but the sound is perfect.
Basically i would like a DVD quality rip. All the times i have used handbrake the picture is crap.
cheers
Handbrake should be able to yield a picture very near the original DVD quality.
Use the non-legacy preset (legacy refers to "old" preset from previous versions). You can tweak video quality with the slider. The Handbrake site has a lot of information about ways to max out the quality of the picture from a DVD rip. One is sliding the quality slider up from the default to about 62%.
Handbrake is taking a compressed format on the DVD, then rendering it to re-compress it into an .m4v fiile. Any time you re-compress a compressed format, some image quality will be lost. However, Handbrake tends to yield a picture that is far from "crap", often fooling users into believing it is as good as the DVD version.
If you are using the Handbrake preset, and the DVD is not 4:3 native, Handbrake should crop the resulting file to whatever aspect ratio it is on the DVD. For example, if you are ripping a 16:9 widescreen movie, the resulting .m4v should be 16:9 (rectangle), not 4:3 (square). I've found that some DVD's that are not "enhanced for widescreen televisions" (anamorphic) will sometimes render as a 4:3 picture with the black bars at the top & bottom, but most of the time Handbrake will crop out the black bars, yielding a "just the movie" render. When you play this back on your TV (assuming you have a widescreen TV), black bars may be inserted to preserve the aspect ratio. For example, if you rip an anamorphic DVD that is even wider than 16:9, then try to play it back on a 16:9 widescreen TV, black bars will be added to the top & bottom to preserve the full width (aspect ratio) of the movie.
If you are watching on a 4:3 TV, naturally everything will render in 4:3, and widescreen DVD rips will simply have bigger black bars at the top & bottom of the screen.
One more thing, assuming you've plugged your apple TV into a fresh jack on the set, make sure your TV is not set for 4:3 playback (thus forcing any input on that jack to show as 4:3). This would be something to check in your TV menus, not Handbrake or apple TV.