DVD ripping for COMPLETE NEWBIES.
If you are completely clueless about how to rip a DVD to your G1 (like I was a week ago) this post is for you.
This method will rip a movie straight from your DVD to an MP4 file that the G1 Video Player 1.0 knows how to play.
You will need to download and run HandBrake (an open source ripper)
http://handbrake.fr/ HandBrake has the simplest, most intuitive UI of any ripper I have found so far.
Here are some settings that work for the G1. Some experimentation may find a better set of parameters, but these work and yield good results. A two hour movie ends up about 375 MB.
Source: Browse to the VIDEO_TS folder on your DVD
Title: Select the longest one.
Destination: Wherever you want to keep the file. You can actually rip directly to the mounted SD card of the G1, if you want.
Preset: Classic works. Others may also, I haven't tested them yet.
OutPut Settings: Set Encoder to Mpeg4, Audio to AAC, uncheck the two other checkboxes.
On the Picture Settings tab, turn off Crop, check "Loose Anamorphic", and set width to 480. (NOTE: sometimes you have to check Anamorphic PAR before Loose Anamorphic becomes usable. Maybe this is a GUI bug?)
On the Video tab, set the Quality Avg Bitrate to 384.
Click Start in the upper left corner. A 2 hour movie takes about 45 min to encode.
Hopefully people will find this helpful.
EDIT: If the DVD you want to rip is copy protected, you will need to also install DVD43 (
http://www.dvd43.com ), a system tray application that de-copy-protects DVDs on the fly. There aren't any configuration parameters, you just install it and forget it. It silently removes copy protection as you read data from the DVD. All credit for this goes to mikey1022 at xda