HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.

It is my tool of choice when it comes to backing up my DVDs. It allows me to shrink DVDs to a relatively small size and convert them to a web-playable format, such as mp4.

I use the Command Line version of HandBrake simply because it is more efficient and I love typing geeky commands in my terminal window.  So here it is, the simplest command to convert your DVD into an .mp4 file is this:

HandBrakeCLI -i VIDEO_TS -o myVideo.mp4 -e x264 -b2000 -B 192

That will encode a source video located at the path VIDEO_TS to an output file called myVideo.mp4. It will use x264 with a bitrate of 2000 to encode the video, and encode the audio as 128kb/s AAC.

I would like to welcome my dear sister to the blogosphere - the yellowtrace blog.  She has been blogging for about a month and I'm amazed with the number of ideas and thoughts she has shared in such a short period of time.  I find her blog posts very inspiring even though we have completely different careers and characters.

She's a very talented Interior Designer and I'm just a code buster.
She's cool and I'm not.
She's extremely creative and I'm not.
Her blog posts are exciting and mine are not.
These are just some of the differences between us, but the key difference is: I can build a good Website and she can't :-)

Best of success sis!

I've been thinking about blogging for a few years now and one of the main reasons for my hesitation was the commitment. These days, I feel a lot more settled :) and I feel that I should start contributing to the community, which has been very helpful to me and my professional career.

For those of you who don't know me, I come from an engineering background. I graduated from the University of Technology, Sydney in 2003 with a Computer Systems Engineering degree under my belt. I currently work as a Senior Web Applications Developer at Learnosity and I feel very privileged to work in a small team of experts. I occasionally do a bit of work for markomedia when I hear someone say "Hey Marko, I need a Website".

I have a strong passion for web technologies and in this blog I will be sharing my web experiences with the world. I specialise in Adobe products, but lately I've been embracing open source technologies. My interests in life are quite diverse, but web stuff is probably the only one worth blogging about. Having said that, don't be surprised if occasionally I blog about a 3 metre shark I came head-to-head with on my regular weekend dive.

Stay tuned
Marko