Now, you need to select which format you'll be translating your movie to from HandBrake's preset menu. Most of its preset outputs are for Apple devices. If you don't use any of those, I always choose the Normal profile.

If you're a read video expert, or want to be one, you can manually adjust how the conversion happens. For guidelines on how to do this, the best place to start is this work-in-progress guide: .

You can play with these on the Video and Audio tabs, if you want, but the defaults work fine for me ninety-nine times out of a hundred. I've known some people to be tempted to try to make a movie higher definition than its source material. That doesn't work. You can downgrade its quality, from say 1080p to 720p to save space, but you can't make a video better than its source material.

HandBrake allows you to select multiple movies for conversion at once. To do this, you add your selection to the queue. Then, when you're done selecting your films, just hit the start button... and get ready to wait.

On my video conversion system, a Gateway computer with 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate, 6GBs of RAM, and a 2.5GHz E5200 Pentium Dual Core processor, I convert movies in about the same time it would take to play them. That is a 90-minute movie takes about 90-minutes to turn into a media center friendly video file.