James and Handbrake Sitting in a Tree...

I love Handbrake. Love it. Love it. Love it. Love it.

What's Handbrake, you say? It's a free little application that allows me to rip my DVDs into digital files so I can watch them on my iPhone or on our AppleTV. This comes in handy when Noble wants to watch Cars - no, Curious George, no - Mickey, no - Cars! Or if I want to take some movies with me to watch on a business trip. I finally got saw The Godfather earlier this year this way. Quit laughing.

But back to Handbrake. It's been around for a few years, but encoding a movie has usually taken somewhere around two to three hours to encode. But that was on my old Mac Mini. When I got my awesome new iMac a couple of months ago, the encode time dropped to about an hour and a half for a full length movie. Wow! I loved it. It couldn't get any better than this! Right?

Wrong. Last week they released a 64-bit version of Handbrake. Hominahominahominahominahominahominahomina. This thing is fast. I just encoded The Polar Express, one of our favorite holiday family movies, in about 45 minutes, although most movies seem to take just a little over an hour to encode. And ripping episodes of How I Met Your Mother to play on the AppleTV without getting up to switch discs now takes about 8 minutes each. The new 64-bit version also averages about 49.6 fps when encoding, which is awesome.