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So is anyone really sick of my talking about the awesomeness of my iPod Touch yet? Yeah? Too bad, here’s another awesomeness article!

So in preparation for Teri and I’s upcoming vacation to Europe, I wanted some video content to watch on the plane. So on the iTunes store, I bought the Battlestar Galactica miniseries and Season 1 of the show. So far I’m 3/4 of the way through the mini-series and it’s pretty cool. I’m going to hold off on watching the season until we get on the plane however.

I was thinking last night, you know . . . I have a pretty large DVD collection and it would be nice to have a couple of those to watch on the plane too. However, I DON’T want to bring my laptop and the iPod Touch being a perfectly capable video device, it would be nice to play DVD’s on my iPod. So I Googled “Rip DVD to iPod”. Most articles dealt with Macs (Don’t think I won’t have a new MacBook someday) but a couple gave advice for PC’s. (It’s a much easier, one step process on a Mac BTW)

So keep in mind, this is still pretty much a grey area . . . ripping DVD’s. You ARE allowed a backup copy of your DVD, however how that’s to be stored or even if it’s to be used is another story.

So the article I found recommended two products, both free. (Free is good) The first, DVD Decrypter, rips your DVD to a .VOB file. The second, Videora iPod Converter, converts your file to an MPEG 4 file (.mp4 the format used for iPod). So yesterday before I left for work, I dropped in “The Shawshank Redemption“, my favorite movie of all time, and let DVD Decrypter do it’s thing. When I got home later that evening, I converted it using Videora. I’m not sure how long the process took, but it would have been WAY faster to just watch the movie. I would guess overall it took nearly 5 hours for the whole process. So you really have to want that DVD on the iPod.

After the file was converted, I imported it into iTunes, copied the cover art from Amazon and voila! Shawshank Redemption on my iPod!

If I do two or three between now and the time we go to Europe, I’ll be all set for my in-flight movies!