Aug 24 2010
Automated DVD and Blu-Ray backup, encoding and tagging… right to iTunes
First written back in October of 2009, this post on the Handbrake forums is the backbone of my AppleTV home theater setup.
While it takes a bit of fiddling to set up, it allows me to use my old MacBook Pro as a “Media Mac” that backs up my DVD collection while also making that media available via iTunes and shared across my network to my AppleTV.
Using the system is simple: I insert a DVD and the Batch Rip Dispatcher Automator action asks if it’s a DVD of a movie or a TV series1 , it copies the contents to an appropriate Batch Rip Folder and renames it automatically. Then, in the wee hours of the evening, an iCal action springs into…well…action and summons Handbrake to encode everything for iTunes. An Automator action kicks in to add metadata, cover art, and the correct title for the resulting files and then Hazel moves it all to my backup folders and adds the movies to iTunes. Once in iTunes, the regular update process propagates the media to my AppleTV making them available for viewing.
It all works like a well-oiled machine. Every time I slide in a disc, my mind reared on Looney Tunes cartoons can’t help but start me humming this tune:
- this can be set to auto-run if you plan to rip a bunch of movies [↩]
Are you a slob? Do you need someone to follow you around with a garbage bag and a hamper to pick up after you? Does this slovenliness extend to your Mac? If so, you need 
The things we love about our Macs don’t always come out of Cupertino. Many of our favorite Mac things are shareware apps that make the Mac experience even better. It is often those software jewels that can keep us from enjoying a new operating system like the soon-to-be-released Leopard–it just isn’t the same unless we can bring those apps with us.