Recently my son asked me if I could locate a video of him scoring 35 points in one half of a high school basketball game. The game happened about eighteen or nineteen years ago. Fortunately many years ago I transferred the VHS-C format video to a digital format and created DVD’s of each of the games from his senior season. Thank goodness my wife is much more organized than me and she remembered where the DVD collection was. Now the problem was moving from the DVD format to digital video that could be loaded onto our son’s iOS device for playback. That’s where Handbrake came to my rescue. If you’re not familiar Handbrake is a great tool for video transcoding. Add to that it’s open source too.
My daily driver is a System76 Darter Pro and it’s currently running Pop!_OS 20.04. I had to install Handbrake which is easy from the command line, $ sudo apt install handbrake. After that I attached a USB connected DVD drive and in about thirty minutes I created a video which can be uploaded to my son’s iPad. Open source software is an incredible bargain and tools like Handbrake are great. You can run Handbrake on Windows and MacOS if you don’t have a Linux computer.