Declutter your home by converting old DVDs to iTunes
A simple guide to converting your DVD movies to iTunes and sharing them on your home network.
I can’t remember the last time I bought a DVD.
Since the emergence of streaming services like Netflix, fiddling around with the DVD player and getting frustrated because it keeps skipping the best bits of the movie has really lost its charm.
But, as much as I like the convenience of ‘on-demand’ services, most of the movies I actually want to watch are not available on Netflix, or any other streaming service — they are sitting in a box in the attic gathering dust.
My movie collection consists of an impressive range of post-apocalyptic movies like The Terminator and Soylent Green, interspersed with some pretty awful chick flick movies like Legally Blonde (courtesy of my wife).
Fortunately, there are just enough chick flick movies to lay over the top of the important DVDs, thereby protecting them from the worst of the dust.
These are the movies I want to watch on-demand (Sci-Fi, not chick flicks). Plus, I already spent a lot of money on my collection, so I’m reluctant to spend that again by lining Tim Cook’s pockets.
The obvious solution to this problem is to rip my movies and add them to iTunes so I can stream them to my iPad(s), iPhone(s), or AppleTV(s).
Whenever I’ve tried this in the past I always ended up wasting a lot of time trawling obscure forums and trying to reverse-engineer the correct command line settings for various software tools — and failing miserably.
In fact, I found this seemingly simple task so insanely difficult that I became convinced that Apple et al have deliberately taken steps to put you off from doing so, further enlarging their aforementioned pockets.
Fortunately, the extended lockdown here in the UK has afforded me the time to persevere with this, and my latest attempt has finally ended in success!
I thought it would share this hard-won knowledge by writing a simple ‘how-to guide’ in the hope it might save other movie fans some bother.
In this article I will show you:
- How to set up your computer with all the software required.
- A worked example for converting DVDs to iTunes using the undisputed best movie of all time, ever — The Terminator.
All software mentioned in this article is free to use.
Setting up your computer
Manipulating media files is very computationally intensive so it helps if you have access to a large spec machine, but you should be able to run the conversion on pretty much any machine (although it might take a while!).
I am using an Apple iMac (late 2013) with 8 cores, an SSD hard drive, and 32 GB of memory. The operating system version is macOS Mojave 10.14.6.
A quick note on conventions used in this article:
- Any command that starts with
"$"denotes a terminal command:
$ brew install <formula>… means you should type in a terminal "brew install <formula>"
2. Any command that starts with ">” is a comment after running a command:
> Installation successful… means you should see a message in the terminal window once the installation is complete.
Right, let’s get on with it …!
Step 1: Enable hidden directories in Finder
First, you need to configure the Finder app so we can see hidden directories.
Open a terminal window and type:
$ defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true
> Changes your system settings to show hidden files and foldersThen:
$ killAllFinder
> Closes all open Finder windows to apply new settings
Step 2: Restart Finder
Check you can see <computer name>/usr/local (on my machine <computer name> is server).
Step 3: Install Homebrew
Now we need to install a package manager to allow installation of other software in a standard way. Enter Homebrew!
Open a terminal window and type:
$ /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
You should see the installation script kick off …
You may get prompted to install Xcode Command Line Tools. This is normal, so just follow the instructions — it may require you to enter your user password.
When it completes you will see:
Step 4: Install MakeMKV
MakeMKV is used to convert raw DVD files into an intermediate file format (.MKV) that can then be converted into a format that is compatible with iTunes.
As the MakeMKV app has a UI we need to install it with Homebrew cask.
Open a terminal window and type:
$ brew tap caskroom/cask
Wait for it to complete, then type:
$ brew cask install makemkv
You should see a new app under /Applications called MakeMKV.app.
Step 5: Install HandBrakeCLI
HandBrake is a post-production tool. Its primary purpose is to convert videos from supported source formats to a file format (.MP4) that will work on your mobile phone, tablet, TV, etc.
As the HandBrake app has a command-line interface (CLI) so we can install it directly with Homebrew.
Open a terminal window and type:
$ brew install handbrake
Step 6: Check installation
That’s all the software we need.
If you check your usr/local directory you should see two new directories under /Caskroom/makemkv and /Cellar/handbrake:
Example: Converting a DVD to iTunes
Now we will run through a worked example for converting a DVD to iTunes format.
Step 1: Copy raw DVD files to your hard drive
This is not strictly required, but I find it is faster to copy the raw files from the DVD to the local file system.
This means faster read operations from SSD during conversion, rather than much slower read operations from the DVD drive.
You should end up with a local file directory full of .IFO, .VBO, and .BUP files.
Don’t worry if you see a different set of files, the raw movies files will be under a subdirectory, most likely named /VIDEO_TS.
This is what I see after copying The Terminator:
Step 2: Convert to MKV format
Open the MakeMKV.app application.
Depending on your security settings, you may get a warning like this:
In this case, open System Preferences and select Security & Privacy. Then select Open Anyway.
When the warning dialog opens again, select Open. You should now see the app UI:
Select the button at the top left (the one with a movie camera icon) and navigate to the directory on the local file system where the raw DVD files are located (in this example /TERMINATOR/VIDEO_TS/VIDEO_TS.IFO), then select Open.
Select all the checkboxes on the left (in this case there is only one) and then choose the output folder (in this example /TERMINATOR/MKV). Then select the “Make MKV” button on the top right.
When finished, you will see the following dialog:
You will also see .MKV file(s) in the output directory in Finder:
Step 3: Convert to iTunes format
In order to create file formats that iTunes will accept we need to encode video as .MP4 and audio as AC-3.
Not only will HandBrake convert to these formats, it also comes with a wide range of presets that define the best configuration settings for different target devices.
Open a terminal window and type:
$ HandBrakeCLI -z
> List all presetsYou will see there are presets for Android, Apple, Amazon Fire, Playstation, Windows, Xbox and Web formats. The full list is documented here.
As I want to optimise for iPad and iPhone devices, I am going to use the Apple 1080p60 Surround preset.
When using a preset HandBrake needs three input parameters:
- The input file name
- The output file name
- The name of the preset
Open a terminal window and type:
$ HandBrakeCLI -i <path>/TERMINATOR/MKV -o <path>/TERMINATOR/Terminator.mp4 -Z "Apple 1080p60 Surround"The <path> is the path to where your MKV directory is.
For example, if you had the /TERMINATOR/MKV directory under User/Movies then you would use -i ~/Movies/TERMINATOR/MKV where ~/ points to the user’s root directory.
In my case, the /TERMINATOR/MKV directory is on a different volume, so I need to use -i /Volumes/media/RAW/TERMINATOR/MKV for the input directory.
Here is the full command:
You can see I am specifying the output file to be Terminator.mp4 under ~/Movies, the user root directory.
The conversion process is very CPU intensive. You can see that all the available CPUs are being maxed out:
The HandBrake app gives you constant feedback on progress. You can see the process is ~31% complete with an estimated completion time of ~19mins:
When the HandBrake process completes you should see:
We can also see the Terminator.mp4 file has been successfully created:
Step 4: Add to iTunes Library
Now we can import the Terminator.mp4 movie into iTunes.
Open iTunes and select iTunes | Preferences from the application menu. Select the Advanced tab and configure your settings as follows:
iTunes configuration is a matter of personal preference, but I like to configure the iTunes Media Folder Location on my /Volumes/media drive, have iTunes organise this folder, and move (rather than copy) files when adding to the library.
Now select File | Add to Library and select the Terminator.mp4 file from the output directory.
In iTunes, select Films from the dropdown menu and click on Home Videos. You should see the movie has been imported into iTunes:
Step 5: Add artwork
You can add artwork in iTunes by simply right-clicking on the video and selecting Video Info. You should see this dialog:
Click on the Artwork tab and then Add Artwork. You can download a movie cover image from IMDB and then select it:
After the image is loaded, just click OK.
You should now see the artwork applied to the movie:
Step 6: Set up Home Sharing
If you have a network at home you can configure iTunes to share the movies in your library to any user on your network.
Select iTunes | Preferences from the application menu. Select the Sharing tab and configure your settings as follows:
You may need to enable file sharing on your Mac for this to work.
In this case, open System Preferences and select Sharing. Then enable File Sharing:
Users should now be able to stream the videos in iTunes over the local network using the AppleTV app on iPad, iPhone, or AppleTV.
If you liked this article please show your appreciation by giving some claps, sharing, and following me … unless you’re Tim Cook!
Martin Swanson is Co-Founder of Atomic Wire, a technology firm that helps to stimulate, support, and sustain high growth by leveraging stream processing to enable real-time decisions, with zero-error. We help clients design and deliver a streaming data architecture — the signature DNA of disruptive companies that want to react to events in real-time to gain a competitive advantage. Previously Head of Innovation at UBS’s Group Operations division, Martin led the digital transformation strategy for a global post-trade environment with over 10,000 operations staff and an annual TCO of CHF 1.5bn. Martin has over 20 years of experience working with Tier 1 banks and market infrastructure providers and has held senior technology roles in post-trade processing for securities, derivatives, and FX products.
