The results are also pretty impressive when the iphone is plugged into a modest hotel room tv via an apple component cable or projected via the super portable, focus free Microvision SHOWWX laser projector.

First, I decrypt the DVD using DVD Decrypter. Be sure to select the File mode of operation and it fills a folder discname/video_ts with various .ifo .bup and .vob files. These are the raw dvd files so can easily run to 4GB for single layer movies.

I used to use Videora but its advertising supported model, while reasonable, is implemented in a very clunky way and though the results are good and pretty fast it’s a PITA process.  So, recently I’ve downloaded Handbrake which is a self contained native windows app (also available on mac & Linux) and is open source. This works a treat and when told the folder mentioned above will detect the main title in the folder then you just choose the iPhone presets and away it goes.

30 to 40 minutes later you have the .m4v file which is mp4 format and can be dragged into iTunes and synced with the iphone easily.

Hmm… surely, I think to myself, a virtual cd burner would be useful here. I’d like to tell iTunes to burn an audio CD all the while having a virtual process take this output and convert to MP3 on the fly and save to disk.

Well, it exists and it works. It’s called Noteburner and you can try it for free then pay a modest $40 approx.

I just “burned” a 10 hour playlist (a load of purchased Richard Feynman Physics lectures in case you’re wondering) and lo, now I have all the stuff that I paid for sitting pretty as MP3s. Resulting files fit on a single writable CD so my travelling world is complete.

The rest of my music/audiobook collection, such as it is, is being converted as I type this.

One note of caution though, there is not much CPU to go around as iTunes sends out CD data and Noteburner rips it. Using a browser to post blog entries is fine but nothing else is going to get done.