I’ve had an iPhone for several months now, and I use it for all the usual stuff – email, music, calendar, text messaging, and showing off photos. I even watched a couple of YouTube movies once. I’ve never tried to watch a television show or movie on it. The main reason for that is I just don’t feel like paying for them on iTunes. Enter my wife.

She bought a new iPod Nano and wanted to load episodes from our collection of Family Guy DVDs onto it. I had no idea how to rip a DVD on my MacBook Pro and convert it into the proper format for viewing on an iPod. I fired up Google and started looking around. Luckily I ran across an open source, free software product called HandBrake. HandBrake allows you to specify a DVD and the tracks you want to rip onto your computer. It also allows you to choose from a long list of preset output formats including iPod hi-rez and low-rez, iPhone, AppleTV, QuickTime, Playstation Portable, Playstation 3, Television, and others. You simply choose what you want to create and start it up. It seems to be very lightweight and produces great video that I was able to import into iTunes and then sync over to my wife’s iPod and my iPhone. Sound quality is great as well.

So now that I’ve found yet another cool thing I like about my iPhone, I’m going out to look for one of those cases with the stand in the back so I can watch a movie without leaning my iPhone against something. No more trying to get my laptop out to watch a movie on a plane and hoping the person in front of me doesn’t do the kamikaze lean back and crush the screen.

Oh – and for all you Winblows users out there, they have a version for you, too.