Badaboom is a media converter that transcodes various input files to render your *cough* DVD backups *cough* in h264, tailored for iPod/PSP/XBox/PS3 etc.
The clever bit is that it uses the (Nvidia) GPU to handle the transcoding, rather than the CPU, which is a Good Thing because graphics cards are designed to handle masses of parallel computation of the type you get in transcoding video.
To this end, even though I'm actually transcoding TheWire-1x01 in the background, I can type this post in Firefox without too much lag, whereas had I used something like AutoGordianKnot, Ione would've ground to a near complete halt as my (admittedly feeble) CPU melted.
Badaboom ain't free - I'm running ep 1 of The Wire as my test case to see how it renders on the XBox before deciding whether to buy the full version (which is only c£20, so not exactly prohibitive), but it seems to have a decent interface with some sensible presets, doesn't seem to crash as often as handbrake and is less convoluted than AGK, so it could be the thing I've been looking for (aside, of course, from the 1TB drive to put all these DVD rips on).
Badaboom won't rip encrypted DVDs (basically, just about all commercial ones), but DVD Shrink is my friend on that one. DVD Shrink is a cool utility, but you have to sleuth around a bit to find a downloadable executable, because it's allegedly not wholly legal to point to it. So when you do locate your source, it would be advisable to run an MD5 checksum to get some reassurance that you're installing what you thought you were installing...
Proper post on DVD -> h264 file coming up somewhen, with pretty pictures 'n everything...
The clever bit is that it uses the (Nvidia) GPU to handle the transcoding, rather than the CPU, which is a Good Thing because graphics cards are designed to handle masses of parallel computation of the type you get in transcoding video.
To this end, even though I'm actually transcoding TheWire-1x01 in the background, I can type this post in Firefox without too much lag, whereas had I used something like AutoGordianKnot, Ione would've ground to a near complete halt as my (admittedly feeble) CPU melted.
Badaboom ain't free - I'm running ep 1 of The Wire as my test case to see how it renders on the XBox before deciding whether to buy the full version (which is only c£20, so not exactly prohibitive), but it seems to have a decent interface with some sensible presets, doesn't seem to crash as often as handbrake and is less convoluted than AGK, so it could be the thing I've been looking for (aside, of course, from the 1TB drive to put all these DVD rips on).
Badaboom won't rip encrypted DVDs (basically, just about all commercial ones), but DVD Shrink is my friend on that one. DVD Shrink is a cool utility, but you have to sleuth around a bit to find a downloadable executable, because it's allegedly not wholly legal to point to it. So when you do locate your source, it would be advisable to run an MD5 checksum to get some reassurance that you're installing what you thought you were installing...
Proper post on DVD -> h264 file coming up somewhen, with pretty pictures 'n everything...
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