The environmentally friendly way to watch and listen to home and mobile entertainment has been the digital way for several years now.

I’ll set clients iTunes configurations to automatically import and eject and CD that gets inserted into their Mac, this ensures that the CD Drive motor spins for a maximum of five minutes to convert the audio into digital mp3′s or aac’s on the hard drive, thereby saving the rotations that would be used up if the CD played the standard way, that is, the CD spins around and around for about 60 minutes a la LP’s.

I also endorse this method of Rip now, watch later to DVD’s and video, where a DVD has been purchased, the responsible and energy efficient practice is to rip the DVD using HandBrake and adding the movie or video to iTunes, this can take anywhere from twenty minutes to eight hours for an older Macintosh, however, the benefits are vast. You’ll put your dvd safely away in it’s case post Rip and watch your movie from iTunes, your iPod (Nano, Classic or Touch), your iPhone, your Apple TV, or you can even post it to your personal web space for watching when you’re without any of these things (or if you’d like your girlfriend or family to see the movie).

Ripping DVD’s using handbrake not only, saves energy, wears your Superdrive down less, makes the video portable, protects your original DVD copy and is cool, but also, eliminates any Region Coding that DVD’s may have on them. For example, say you’re in Milan and buy a copy of the wonderful Romanze Criminale DVD, unavailable most everywhere else, this movie is one of Italian cinema’s masterpieces, when you arrive home in California, your Mac informs you that “Hey, your Superdrive will only play Region 1 (American) DVD’s”, sure you can change this to European Region or Asian Region, etc. but you can only change this five times, so after watching Romanze Criminale, you switch back to American to watch a classic Woody Allen DVD and then back to Italian region next week to watch a collector edition Fellini you just bought in Genoa. Pretty soon you can’t change your region anymore!
Enter Handbrake, the one stop shop for converting DVD’s to local video files that will play on your Mac, iPod, iPhone, MacBook, Apple TV or the web.
Try out Handbrake and you’ll be saving the planet as well as carrying Fellini, Romanzo Criminale, and, Woody Allens great movies all on your gorgeous iPod. You’ll never think about Region Coding again!