John: We’re on the rotation. So we’re on software. This is software day. And I’m going to recommend a product that I’ve been using for decades.
Adam: Boomer product, boomer product.
John: At least a decade. Okay, this is a handy-dandy product. It’s free. It is called Handbrake. You can look it up, you can Google it.
Adam: We have definitely done Handbrake before.
John: No, we’ve never done Handbrake.
Adam: Yes, we have.
John: I’ve talked about it before, but I’m sure it’s not tip of the day. What does it do?
Adam: It’s to rip, to steal content.
John: No.
Adam: Yes, that’s what Handbrake is. It’s to convert product.
John: It’s to convert one…
Adam: Okay. I’m sorry, it’s not to steal content. It’s to convert product from one format that is possible…
John: To another. For example, here’s a good use for it. You own, you own—I don’t know, a lot of people don’t like this idea, but I’ve always been a fan of it. I own, I own—I bought, paid for—a DVD.
Adam: Oh, my. And you want to send it to all your friends.
John: No. I want to put it on my phone.
Adam: You do not want to put it on your phone. What, so it can play in the desk drawer?
John: So you can play it on the airplane, because you’ll bring a phone on the plane.
Adam: When have you been on a plane recently?
John: I haven’t been recently, but if I’m going to go on a plane, I’m going to do this. I’m going to take the DVD, I’m going to run it through Handbrake. It’ll bust it up into pieces, and it’ll say to me “what do you want to do with this? You want to make it small? You want to make it big? You want to make it a small file, a big file? You want to change it from MP4 to MKV?”.
“What do you want to do? Do you want to change the bit rate? Do you want to do what?”. And you tell it, and it makes the conversion. It doesn’t take that long. Actually, it’s pretty fast. And next thing you know, I’ve got the movie playing on my phone.
Adam: So if anyone out there receives a file from John that has Academy watermarks, then you know how he did it.
Adam: Handbrake is an outstanding product. I used to use it on the Mac because I think it’s cross-platform.
John: I don’t know. I don’t have a Mac.
Adam: And for all of us Unix guys, we just use FFmpeg. We’re real men. We don’t mess around with Handbrake.