Digitizing DVD collection - UI

oneblondebrow

You can do it all for free (apart from your time).

Firstly do you have Windows Media Center on your computer?

I suggest My MOVIES http://www.mymovies.dk/ it adds all the info for the DVD's including covers and looks pretty good and is pretty quick.

You can either convert your dvds into a compressed file using MKV or DIVX for instance or use DVD Shrink http://www.dvdshrink.org/ which gives you the options to remove all the extra's and stuff and compress the dvd.

Or there is Tversity http://tversity.com/ which is what i am currently using as My Xbox 360 can access the TVversity as a Media Server.

It would be worth using a RAID configuration if your motherboard has the compatibility as you will be kicking yourself after spending a large amount of time backing up the dvd's and then losing it all on a Disk failure.

RAID 1 MIRRORING is one way, it will require at least 2 identical disks and it literally mirrors all the data on both disks, You will lost the storage on 1 though, So for instance you would need to have 2 x 1Tb drives but windows will only see 1Tb of space, If either of the drives fail you won't lose all the data.

RAID 5 (this is what i use) it has to be a minimum of 3 drives. so for instance you could have 3 x 1Tb drives but the RAID distributes a parity "file" across all 3 drives, this means that if 1 fails the data is not lost but that drive will need replacing so the other drives can rebuilt the failed drive otherwise they are not potected.

RAID 10, this is a good RAID, is Mirrors the drives like RAID 1 but then Stripes the drives (RAID 0), this requires a minimum of 4 drives and you will lose the storage capacity of two of them, although it has good performance as the striping part of the RAID takes half the data from 1 mirrored set and half the data from the other at the same time speeding up read and write performance.

If you don't have RAID on your motherboard then you can buy RAID add on cards.

almillar

Sorry to be a pedant, but you don't digitise your DVDs, they're already digital!
Also - Plex with no remote control? Plenty of apps for Android and iPhone at least, that act as remote controls for whatever device you're running Plex or XBMC on. Controls via IP over WiFi, not infra red. Slick Remote is the one I use on Android for Plex.

Idiophreak

almillar wrote: »

Also - Plex with no remote control? Plenty of apps for Android and iPhone at least, that act as remote controls for whatever device you're running Plex or XBMC on. Controls via IP over WiFi, not infra red. Slick Remote is the one I use on Android for Plex.

Ah, I was thinking just this morning that it would be cool to do this anyway, even if I had another remote

And yes, I know DVDs are digital - but, strictly, I don't believe this means they can't be digitized. Digitizing, typically, is showing something in a digital form and *usually* that infers that the source isn't digital to start with, but not always so....it can just be putting it into a different digital form or even just copying the thing some place else.

[Deleted User]

The correct term is 'trans-coding' - converting one digitial encoding system (DVD) to another (e.g. AVI)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcoding

fenlander_uk

800 disks on to 1TB? Good luck with that! ISO copies come in from 4-8GB each and quality X264 rips at 2-3GB, though you can do 1GB if you don't mind loss of quality. X264 rips in approx real time, unless you have one mighty PC to rip them on. You will need the patience of a saint and you'll be largely wasting your time - a lot of it.

Plus, you'll need to double your disk capacity for backing up. After spending a sizable chunk of your life ripping 800 DVDs, I hope you're not going to trust them to a single copy. Imagine if the disk goes down and you have to start ripping the 800 DVDs again.:eek:

I use a program called Personal Video Database to mange my videos. Some are on HD, some on DVD: the software can catalogue both. Just stick a numeric label on your DVDs, store them in number order, and let PVD, or something similar, catalogue them. You can rip the ones, or the bits, you watch on a regular basis to HD and leave the rest where they are. When you choose a movie from your catalogue, it will tell you which disk to insert. The other way is sheer masochism.

Idiophreak

fenlander_uk wrote: »

800 disks on to 1TB? Good luck with that! ISO copies come in from 4-8GB each and quality X264 rips at 2-3GB, though you can do 1GB if you don't mind loss of quality. X264 rips in approx real time, unless you have one mighty PC to rip them on. You will need the patience of a saint and you'll be largely wasting your time - a lot of it.

Plus, you'll need to double your disk capacity for backing up. After spending a sizable chunk of your life ripping 800 DVDs, I hope you're not going to trust them to a single copy. Imagine if the disk goes down and you have to start ripping the 800 DVDs again.:eek:

I use a program called Personal Video Database to mange my videos. Some are on HD, some on DVD: the software can catalogue both. Just stick a numeric label on your DVDs, store them in number order, and let PVD, or something similar, catalogue them. You can rip the ones, or the bits, you watch on a regular basis to HD and leave the rest where they are. When you choose a movie from your catalogue, it will tell you which disk to insert. The other way is sheer masochism.

I'll take a look into it and see how much space I think I need...can always buy more...and I will have backups, yeah, probably raid 5 or 10 above. I've got a few films around 1GB on HDD and I think the quality's quite adequate, but it's not a big deal if I need more space.

Whilst there are 800 discs, I imagine around 600 are worth doing (some are bonus features etc) - if I even did 2 per night, it would be done in less than a year - and I think it's achievable to do far more than that, certainly initially while I'm motivated.

The ripping process will be "insert disk, click rip, wait"...and I may even be able to cut out the second step, who knows...so it's not labout intensive and I spend a couple of hours at the PC each night anyway. I also have a number of other machines (probably 3 or 4) that would be able to rip the things, if not transcode them. If I ripped 4 per hour on 4 machines, I could do 60 in a morning and still keep an eye on the footy, grand prix etc or catch up on Neighbours. I'm not talking about sitting and staring at the thing for days on end, I don't view it as taking a lot of my life (and Lord knows I "waste" plenty of my life, anyway...surfing the net, watching random telly etc...this is quite productive by comparison)...I just need to be sure that I start off down the right path to prevent having to do-over if I find issues later on.

I had another thought about this earlier. For the last couple of years I've been meaning to put together a christmas DVD, including all the christmas episodes from frasier, friends, big bang theory, HIMYM and the rest...The idea that I'd be able to just set up a playlist (or have it play all episodes with the "xmas" tag) is really quite appealing.

S0litaire

Obligitory Pic :

lol!
I've got around 200 DVD's that I''ve been meaning to get around to ripping to a drive. Not sure if i'll stick with my desktop or the R-Pi as my XBMC media centre.

Think this will be my Project over the holiday season in a few weeks ^_^

Idiophreak

S0litaire wrote: »

Obligitory Pic :

lol!
I've got around 200 DVD's that I''ve been meaning to get around to ripping to a drive. Not sure if i'll stick with my desktop or the R-Pi as my XBMC media centre.

Think this will be my Project over the holiday season in a few weeks ^_^

That picture is ALL KINDS OF TRUE!

nicka99

For a compact device for playback you could get an apple tv 2 on eBay and jailbreak with seas0npass from firecore.com. It then xbmc and media player.

Don't get the latest generation (version 3) since there is no jailbreak and might never be one.