Archive DVD's?

[Tjalfe]

I have around 130 DVD's in my collection at this time, and I was Thinking about putting them all on a hdd on the home theater computer, so I can browse / view them at will.. any suggestions to how to do this?.. I was thinking about storing them in DIVX format, as it seems to have pretty decent picture quality.. in which case, what ripper / encoder should I use?..
Also is there a way to preserve the dolby digital soundtrack, should such be present?

And finally, is there some nice software out there for displaying the movies which are available, other than setting windows XP to show thumbnails?

any suggestions are welcome

Thanks.

Kasper

[Wombat]

Well, I would use Xvid, not DIVX. But maybe not compress them at all. You're only looking at about 500GB of data, that's like 2-3 hard drives.

[schmosef]

Dude that's a lot of DVDs. I never understood why people collect movies. Except for the very rare exception, I can't sit through watching a movie twice unless it's been years since the last time I saw it.

Is there a specifc genre that you're interesting in?

For example, I can understand having such a big pr0n collection!

[KvHagedorn]

LOL I would rather have the movies on DVD than a hard drive. A DVD won't crash on you. Besides, it's cool to look through your shelf and pick one out to play.

[GNEP]

I'm with tjalfe here, and would like input on how to do it too - what sw tools do you need to rip (I think this is the right term) your DVD collection to HDD?

My reasoning would be space on bookshelves and convenience - I want to watch the films every now and then, and a computer is my DVD player anyway, but the DVDs themselves to be honest can go hide in a cupboard in another room...

[Tjalfe]

well most of the ones I have I got used from the blockbuster previously played collection... $5.99 to rent one, or $6.99-$19.99 to buy it.. most of them closer to $6.99. Genre is all over the place. I do have them out on the shelf, I just thought it would be neat to have them on the home theater computer aswell
.. my pron collection is in my main computer

[Jammrock]

Well, if you want to compress them I'd go with Wombat and use XviD.

On the flip side, if you want to use HDD based movies build a media server. Use a RAID 5 array (best fault tolerance to space usage ratio) with 4 x 250-400 GB HDDs and 1 x 80 GB HDD. The 80 GB HDD will store OS and applications, the others you can build a nice RAID 5 array. Use a program like DVD Decrypter to build an ISO of your DVDs and put them on the RAID 5 array.

Link the HTPC to the media server, use something like Daemon Tools to mount the ISO to a virtual DVD drive and play it on the HTPC with your prefered player.

That way you get true DVD performance with spending tons of time encoding your DVDs to other compression schemes. The down side would the cost But it's the best way to do it.

Jammrock

[agallag]

I'm with Jammrock. Although it would be pretty expensive, that would be by far the easiest and highest quality way to do it. It would be an exact copy of the original DVD, with all menus, audio tracks, everything.

If you want to save a little space, use DVDShrink to squish the ISO down to 4.7GB. You'd still have all menus and audio, but the video would be compressed a little. This is what I use to backup my DVDs to DVD-R. They still look damn good when compressed, barely noticeable unless you're really looking for the differences.

[High_Jumbllama]

I usually use DVD Decrypter to turn them into an ISO and then use them as virtual drives.

Most though I do not use enough to worry about.

[Paddy]

What 400GB drive would you recommend?

[Wombat]

Originally posted by Paddy
What 400GB drive would you recommend?

The Hitachi.

[xortam]

Originally posted by Jammrock
... Use a RAID 5 array (best fault tolerance to space usage ratio) with 4 x 250-400 GB HDDs and 1 x 80 GB HDD. The 80 GB HDD will store OS and applications, the others you can build a nice RAID 5 array. ...

Why RAID 5? You can always rerip if a disk fails. I plan on throwing all my removable drives (six 250 GBs so far) into a JBOD NAS box.

[Paddy]

Originally posted by Wombat
The Hitachi.

Wow.. £250 each! loads of cash!

How much capacity would you loose using 4x400GB in RAID 5?

[xortam]

Originally posted by Paddy
Wow.. £250 each! loads of cash!
...

I always pay less than $0.50 USD/GB for HDDs (Friday sales at Fry's).

[Dilitante1]

Originally posted by Paddy
Wow.. £250 each! loads of cash!

How much capacity would you loose using 4x400GB in RAID 5?

1 drives worth of space for the parity