OK, so whaddya do?

You come across a DVD compilation of music videos, containing some old songs from your college days. The songs are performed by independent artists who were never released on CD, and never will be.

Well, if you're me, you'd really like to get these songs onto your iPod. That means somehow extracting the audio from the disc, and getting it into mp3 or aiff format, to import into iTunes.

I stick to open source applications and/or freeware when I can, but I did shell out the 60-odd Australian dollars for QuickTime Pro, which can export audio from any QT file into aiff. So the trick, up until now, has been to get DVD video into a QT-supported format.

I did it once using the Streaming/Exporting Wizard in VLC Media Player. I found it very complicated, and slow, but stumbled onto a way that worked. But there was a mountain of settings to wade though, and -- silly me -- I didn't write down the right combination of settings. Since then, I've only been able to generate output files that can't be opened in QuickTime.

Plan B was to use the export function that appears when you click the "Video" tab in Toast 7. But every time I tried to export the DVD-Video file into a QT-supported format, the application would either crash, or hang part-way through. Maybe it's my computer, which is getting a bit long in the tooth now, being an older model G4.

Then out of the sky falls this wonderful application called HandBrake. It's easy to use, it's quick, and it works every time. It will turn DVD video into an MP4 file that I can open in QuickTime. I particularly like the way you can select the video you want to extract by chapter (unlike VLC media player).

One of the reasons I like freeware is that you can try an application to see if it's worth paying for. I've made a donation to the developer of this one. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

One idea, though. Ever thought of adding an option to extract the audio track only? It would save this old user a couple of minutes per song.