Hundreds of DVD's - get me into the 21st century with mass storage.

pfpf

ok, I really am stuck for terminology but here goes.

as per title, I have loads of original dvd's and BR's but am starting to lack space.

in the past I have backed up my dvd's for personal use using dvd-decrypter and dvd-shrink and then burnt onto a blank 4.3gb DVDR.

any advice / links regarding the following would be great - newbie territory.

1. whats this server business all about? can I store loads on a HD and have a menu type setup? (I am looking to play straight via TV).

2. at 4.3gb its a big file per film to be storing on hard drives? how can I make the dvd file smaller and retain best quality? how big a file would be left? in other words how many dvd's could I get on per TB of storage?

3. are my already burnt backups useless as in I couldn't shrink those any further and retain some quality? (my originals are stored but can use if need be).

4. I have not backed up and BR's as I don't have a BR reader/burner in my PC but would principle be same as above?

I think that's it for now. any advice would be great.

thank you.

bob_a_builder

1. - 'server' = somewhere to store and serve the data from, look at either Plex or Media Browser to act as a front end menu
server could be just your normal PC
I use Media Browser, access it from sofa on a tablet/phone, and then 'cast' the required video to TV via chromecast

2. Handbrake will let you control that
using (IIRC ?) default setting average dvd comes out about 800K for me - but a million and one ways to do it to suit own requirements/quality etc

3 I don't know

4 yes

cookie365

If you've got so many you're running out of space, just think what a mammoth task it'd be to copy them all onto a server.

If you do decide to go for it, there are a few options.

The first is a dedicated network attached media player. For example one of the boxes that mede8er sell. Stick in a hard drive, connect it to your network or USB3, plug in the TV, copy the DVD rips or video files onto the drive, and watch. If you stick say a 3TB drive in it you'll get maybe 600 DVDs on it.

If you're prepared to spend more money then some of QNAP's home oriented NAS servers have HDMI ports, so you can use them like the media players. Their big advantages are that you can add several drives, and you can set them up with redundancy - so if a drive fails, you don't lose data. If you buy say 4x 2TB drives and set them up with something called RAID5, you'll get 6TB of storage and won't lose any data if one drive fails.

I don't know about ripping BluRay - never done that, I think there are issues with encryption.