Most of us have an extensive DVD collection. If you wait a short while after the release of a blockbuster DVD, you’ll soon find they cost less than £10. With the various ‘buy three for £15’ offers, it’s easy to collect more DVDs than you have room to store. There are a couple of options. You could take some of the old DVDs down to the car boot sale, or give them to the charity shop. Another option is to backup your DVDs to your hard drive and then store them in the loft.

Large hard drives are more than affordable. Indeed, a fast external 500GB USB hard drive can be purchased for less than £125, so why not grab one of these and use it as a media storage unit? You could grab the audio from your CDs and backup your DVD collection.

HandBrake is an opensource tool that’s designed for one purpose – to backup your DVDs so that you can play them back from your computer. A Mac OS X version has been around for a while and will enable you to backup a DVD to the MPEG4 format, which is playable through QuickTime. With this in mind, any of your backed up DVDs will be playable through the new Apple TV system.

Note that HandBrake should not be used for pirating DVDs. It should only be designed for backing up DVDs that you own in your personal collection. Any backups should be kept for your own personal use and shouldn’t be used for broadcasting through public media.