In the window that appears, drag the Video_TS folder into the Turbo.264 HD application. Return to the Finder and Control-click on the DVD Player Media Document and choose Show Package Contents.
DVD MAC MEDIA CENTER INSTALL
The steps for doing that are these.Īll Together Now: Elgato’s Turbo.H264 will help speed up video conversion on a Mac mini.Īfter plugging the Turbo.264 HD dongle into a free USB port on the back of the mini, install the Turbo.264 HD application and launch it. To do that I used Elgato’s $150 Turbo.264 HD encoder/accelerator hardware and software package to convert the video to Apple TV format.
DVD MAC MEDIA CENTER MOVIE
With these limitations in mind (and with the idea of being able to later watch these movies with an Apple TV) I determined to convert the movie files to an iTunes-friendly format. Plus, they don’t appear under the Movies heading in Front Row, which means you have to navigate to a different folder just to get to them. Although you can take the Video_TS folder that RipIt produces and place it in your Movies folder (and thus access it from Front Row or a media player compatible with Video_TS folders), these folders are huge-over 7GB in some cases. This was a fast solution, but not one I was completely happy with. On my Mac mini, it took RipIt about 46 minutes to rip The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine (a family favorite now no longer in print, making it a perfect DVD to archive). One option is to use RipItApp’s $19 RipIt to create a full-resolution, full-featured, full-sized DVD Player Media Document file, playable with Apple’s DVD Player. But if you’d like to be a purist and do the job more quickly on the mini, you can take one of several approaches. Optionally, you can perform the rip on a faster Mac and then copy the resulting video to the mini. With the use of other tools it’s possible to do this more quickly, but HandBrake is a one-stop solution-insert the disc, choose the output format (I prefer the Apple TV format so I can later access my movies from the set-top box in my office), select the main feature, click Start, and go away for a few hours. While I can rip the main feature of a commercial DVD with HandBrake in about an hour with my Dual-Core Mac Pro and its two 2.66GHz processors, the Mac mini takes three to four times as long using HandBrake.