How To: Make Your Movies Greener

Chances are, your movie collection probably isn’t the greenest thing in your home. Luckily, it’s easier than ever to turn those stacks of DVD’s into digital copies that burn less energy, take up less space, and work just as easily on your TV’s as they do on your iPod or iPhone.

If you’re an iTunes fan, you’ve no doubt noticed that they started selling movies a while back. Their collection is surprisingly strong and with the recently added “Rental” feature, there’s little reason not to take advantage of the enormous library at your fingertips for somewhere between $.99 and $3.99. Of course, the option to buy your favorite titles is still on the table with most movies selling for between $9.99 and $14.99, depending on their release dates. If you happen to have an AppleTV, you can even take advantage of higher quality HD video at a fraction of the cost of any of today’s Blu-Ray players and titles.

Buying and downloading your movies saves a lot of energy, a lot of gas, and (usually) at least a little bit of money. Of course, you’ll still need to take the occasional trip to the theater to see the newest titles (at least to do it legally), but grabbing most of what’s already out on DVD is even easier than finding it in stores.

Even if iTunes isn’t your thing, its competitors have been quick to launch their own similar services with Netflix’s new On-Demand feature quickly shaping up to be a worthy alternative. With over 12,000 titles available in unlimited amounts to all of its subscribers, their service is a little different from iTunes’ buy-and-rent system, but very useful all the same.

Online services are great starting points for making greener choices when it comes to adding new movies to your library but, with the help of some simple software, you can green-up your existing titles too.

Since most of this blog’s readers are visiting from Macs, I’ll go through an easy Mac way to transform your DVD’s into iTunes friendly video files that can easily be played on everything from an AppleTV to an iPod or even your computer itself.

The easiest way to do this is to use a free program like HandBrake, which extracts the DVD to your hard-drive and then converts it into an iTunes friendly format. DVD’s can take up quite a bit of space, so make sure that you have at least four to five gigabytes of free space before you begin. You’ll delete the files later, so they won’t be there for long, but it’s good to have some room to work with.

HandBrake has a number of options, but you’ll probably want to stick to mostly default settings if you’re not overly tech-savvy. The software does offer a number of features and options, however, that can prove useful if you’re converting a lot of movies or notice small differences in visual or audio quality.

If you’d like to convert already-digital copies of movies stored on your hard-drive into an iTunes friendly format, you’ll need to use a different tool. iSquint is a great way to get started, but if you’re looking for more options you may want to look into more feature-friendly apps like VisualHub. As with HandBrake, most of the settings are pretty straightforward, but feel free to dive into the applications’ manuals to play with more advanced settings that control quality and size.