DVD to Android Tablet

Android
Author

Enrico Spinielli

Published

April 2, 2016

How to transfer your DVDs to your Android Tablet

Suppose your kids want to watch their DVDs in the car on their Android tablet…

Here is what you can do (on a Mac OSX 10.9.5):

  • install Handbrake and its CLI

    $ brew cask install handbrake
$ brew cask install handbrakecli

  • install libdvdcss (thanks to lifehacker’s article) in order to bypass copy protection

    $ brew install libdvdcss

  • go to the place where you will place the ripped DVD:

    $ cd ~/Movies

  • convert your DVDs:

    $ HandBrakeCLI -i /Volumes/'my DVD' -o /Volumes/Untitled/Movies/my_dvd.mp4 \
               --native-language="ita" --native-dub \
               --preset="Android Tablet"

    The first two options define the input and output (I save the converted movie on the microSD card /Volumes/Untitled in the Movies directory)

    The --native-language="ita" --native-dub options set Italian as the selected language (if you omit the --native-dub you will get the first audio track language and subtitles in Italian.)

    The last option --preset="Android Tablet" selected the predefined settings that work best for viewing the converted movie on an Android tablet.

    (be prepared to wait for some time…it took 1h 8min 5s for an 87min movie on my old MacBook Pro mid-2009)

There are other preset configurations…Should you need to copy to a different device, use HandBrakeCLI --preset-list to select the one that best fits your needs. Otherwise you can delve into the many settings…!

Note: after the conversion I get my DVD driver completely blocked/unable to read disks and ejecting them all. Sometimes “Repair Disk Permissions” via Disk Utility as described here make it work again… some other times not!

I do the repair via command line as follows (eventually prefix it with sudo):

$ diskutil repairPermissions /

Eventually I succeeded using “System Information”, selecting ‘Disk Burning’ and then hitting File -> Refresh Information. Don’t ask me why or how, I just did it and the driver worked again! (You can do it via the command line by running system_profiler -detailLevel full SPDiscBurningDataType)