Recently, when my son asked me to digitally convert some old DVDs of his high school basketball games, I immediately knew I would use Handbrake[1]. It is an open source package that has all the tools necessary to easily convert video into formats that can be played on MacOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and other platforms.

Handbrake is open source and distributable under the GPLv2 license[2]. It's easy to install on MacOS, Windows, and Linux, including both Fedora[3] and Ubuntu[4]. In Linux, once it's installed, it can be launched from the command line with $ handbrake or selected from the graphical user interface. (In my case, that is GNOME 3.)

Handbrake's menu system is easy to use. Click on Open Source to select the video source you want to convert. For my son's basketball videos, that is the DVD drive in my Linux laptop. After inserting the DVD into the drive, the software identifies the contents of the disk.

As you can see next to Source in the screenshot above, Handbrake recognizes it as a DVD with a 720x480 video in 4:3 aspect ratio, recorded at 29.97 frames per second, with one audio track. The software also previews the video.

If the default conversion settings are acceptable, just press the Start Encoding button and (after a period of time, depending on the speed of your processor) the DVD's contents will be converted and saved in the default format, M4V[5] (which can be changed).

If you don't like the filename, it's easy to change it.

Handbrake has a variety of output options for format, size, and disposition. For example, it

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