Transferring my DVD collection to HTPC

DampCat

DampCat

DampCat

Soldato
Joined
26 Feb 2007
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Location
Leafy Cheshire
Hello.

Sorry mods, close if inappropriate. It's clear i'm not up to anything nefarious but i'm unsure on the rules re: ripping.

I'm looking to start ripping my extensive DVD collection to a hard drive for use in a HTPC. My question is, what settings do people use for their rips? I want the best quality possible, but obviously not sure i want each movie taking up 5gb as that's just silly. I guess 1.5gb per movie is fine if it will look nice on a decent sized screen (32"- 37").

In addition, what do you guys do about backups? It would be sucky if a HDD failed and you lost terabytes of movies/series etc. I'm going to be keeping all my DVD's and their cases but storing them away, so if there's a catastrophic failure i will still have the hard copies, but for the cost of HDDs these days it's worth getting a second if it will save me 12 days of ripping in an emergency.

Cheers
 
I too would like to know, if it's legal to back up my DVD's to use on a HD with a WDTV player

Whats the best program too use, and how long per dvd is it going to take?
 
Personally, I think the best option is to copy what's on the disc to the hard drive even if it does use up 5gb. HDDs are so cheap now, 1tb=200discs? It'll just play back like playing the disc then.

You'll obviously you have to circumvent the copy protection but I can't help you with that I'm afraid. ;)
 
da_mic_1530 said:
Whats the best program too use, and how long per dvd is it going to take?
Click to expand...

Encoding times depend greatly on the hardware you have and whether the app you use will support it. For example, I can encode SD material to good quality AVI in slightly faster than 1:1 with my [email protected], utilising all threads and SSE4. Remove the SSE4 support and your looking at almost doubling the encode time but, add in something like CUDA and an i7 and you could possibly reduce the time by half.

Obviously, HD material takes considerably longer.

Copying the contents of a disc to the HDD is obviously faster.
 
wolvers69 said:
Personally, I think the best option is to copy what's on the disc to the hard drive even if it does use up 5gb. HDDs are so cheap now, 1tb=200discs? It'll just play back like playing the disc then.

You'll obviously you have to circumvent the copy protection but I can't help you with that I'm afraid. ;)
Click to expand...

Indeed, but i have well over 500 discs, and 2.5terabytes will be ~ £180 which is a lot for some time saving!
 
I thought it was illegal to copy any dvd even if you own it, I don't know exactly what the rules are for backing up your collection but I'm reasonably sure you aren't meant to.

Having said that I'm in the process of backing up my DVD collection. I'm using DVD shrink for ripping (please MODS delete if not apt) & I rip full quality, I have tried setting it lower in DVD shrink but it's not that great imho. It takes 5-10 minutes to do each DVD, most average around 4-5 gig with the menu etc stripped off.
I don't know much about encoding to avi etc but I've heard that its pretty slow compared to just ripping, I would rather pay for the hard drives than potentially spend a lot longer (if it is) converting.
 
be careful where you store the original DVDS. I lost a bunch when i left it in the garage, and when winter came, some of the disks had "cracks" in the "silver". The disk itself was fine, but the layer inside was cracked. So dead disks.
 
I use Handbrake to rip the DVDs.

The app has plenty of presets, or you can tweak the settings to your heart's content :)

As for keeping stuff safe.. offsite backup and some kind of Drobo / networked attached storage with RAID 1 would be your best bet.
 
DampCat said:
Indeed, but i have well over 500 discs, and 2.5terabytes will be ~ £180 which is a lot for some time saving!
Click to expand...

If you're doing 500 discs there's even more reason to do it like that. It'll take forever to encode 500 DVDs!!! :eek:

What spec is your PC?
 
... i remember when dvdecrypter did all the work.. sigh.. good memorys

handbrake should be good , but like wolver69 said 500 discs is a bit of a mission

personaly id rip them to a high quality xvid.. but then again im not that fussy about quality with an old 26" flatscreen for a tv
 
use make-mkv rip them to that you can do blueray/hd/dvd then use handbrake to re-encode takes minutes to make mkv from a dvd then encoding approx 1hr each and obviously handbrake queues it so it can happen thru the night etc..

a mkv file will be large ie 5 gb maybe then encoding it to xvid or keeping mkv format just smaller to around 1gb per 90mins is a good practise to go for.

both above are free to use and not against law for personal use.
 
Nuff respect to you DampCat if you're gonna put the time in to encode 500 DVDs.

I couldn't be arsed to do the 40 or so that I've got! :p
 
go look for videohelp dot com it has a step by step guide and explains the settings do a couple and youll get the idea ofwhat you like ,, i usually apply a file size in the box ie i want it to be close to 1gb etc it seems to be best quality


have a look there it mentions settings etc its very good many ideas for what you want but make mkv then on to reencode with handbrake is usualy a highly respected way.
 
£180 for the space - that buys maybe 20 dvds? Can afford the dvds you can afford the hd space tbh. Also, factor in your time - say it takes 30 mins to rip + encode a DVD - x500 = 250 hours. At even £5 an hour that's £750 quid of your time. You could therefor 'save' £470 by not recoding...
 
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