Watch DVDs on Your iPhone

Are you using your iPhone to watch movies? Of course, you can buy movies to download, but what about ripping and converting your DVDs and Youtube clips? A recent article on CNET points out that cracking copyright-protected DVDs is usually illegal, even if you own the DVD and only want to make it available for your personal use on your iPhone. For those who don’t know already AnyDVD will allow you to copy DVDs, just make sure you’re not breaking any local laws if you use it.

However, you might not even need to use it. iTunes itself has a built in converter for making an MP4 movie for your iPod or iPhone, although it’s slow, the article says.

iPhone and video iPods usually support MPEG-4 (.mp4 and .m4v) and QuickTime Movies (.mov), but converting is down to finding the right codec (so that software can render the movie from one form into another). Author Peter Butler recommends Plato DVD to iPod Converter, which rips DVDs as quick as you like into the MP4 file format so that you can use your iPhone to watch DVDs. He also mentions Kate’s Video Converter, but describes it as slightly confusing, so I’m not going to link to that one, because if it confuses an expert, it’s bound to confuse me too.

If it’s Youtube vids you’re after converting, then CinemaForgeLite could be the tool for you. It’s a wizard way to make a Youtube clip into an iPod-readable movie file.

You can download Plato here and grab CinemaForgeLite here. You could even dare to get Slysoft’s AnyDVD can be found here and the well-recommended CloneDVDmobile, but don’t blame me if you get your wrists slapped for using them.