Free PSP video compressor for MAC

Hey everyone,

I know this one is rather specific, but I'm sure someone out there has a good answer for me. I've been lately ripping DVDs to put on my PSP, and I just did The Dark Knight a couple days ago. (I legally bought all the DVDs I've ripped in my life, just so no one gets angry at me.) Anyway, handbrake is an awesome program for ripping DVDs on the mac, the quality is awesome and it only takes an hour or two. (MUCH faster then some other rippers I've tried that result in similar quality.) The problem is that the file sizes I get are absolutely ridiculous. The Dark Knight was about 1.22 gigabytes, and I know I don't have to tell you how annoying it is to fit onto a PSP memory stick.

Anyway, getting the point here, my friend showed me some movies he ripped off of DVDs and then compressed using ALLOK video converter. The quality was just about the same as I'm getting with handbrake, but a 2 1/2 hour movie takes about 350 megabytes of space on his, compared the the 1.22 gigs on mine.

Unfortunately, ALLOK is only available for windows. This mac is the only computer I own, so that's no good for me. I was hoping someone knew of a good, free video compression software for Macs. I know we're a strong minority, so don't bother telling me that. Just check anything you guys know about and get back to me on whether they have a mac version. I tried looking for a while on my own, but after my computer found and stopped a third virus I figured I kind of suck at looking for things like this. Thanks a ton to everyone in advance, especially those who took the time to read this gargantuan post!

I'm assuming that Handbrake is converting the videos for the PSP already. If that is the case (it probably is) then all you have to do is go into the settings and drop the video bitrate. This reduces the quality as well as the size, but since the PSP has a smaller screen you're not really going to notice anything. I find that around 400kbps is a good balance of quality vs size. You can also drop the audio bitrate but that won't give you as much room as the video.

Thanks, I'll try that. What my friend was doing though, was using a DVD ripping program like handbrake (ripping into a format for the PSP) and then using ALLOK as a seperate program to compress the video. When he showed me the difference, I literally could not notice.

O.K., I owe you a huge one. I tried out lowering the bitrate down to 400 for a 5 minute clip, and didn't notice any quality change. I though nothing must have changed, but when I checked the size, it had dropped around 1/3 of it's size, from 40 MBs down to 27. I'll do this for everything I've done already, and should free up over 1 gigabyte of space. I owe you big, fynne.