Any simple ways to rip my own DVD's to Hard Drive to view through Media Center on Vista?

[eno]

I haven't been looking around for a long time for this solution but I am curious if there is a rather straight forward way to take my DVD's and put them onto a Hard drive and then be able to select them through Vista Home Premium Media Center like I can with my ripped audio cds.

Vista Home Premium 32bit
2.8ghz Pentium D
3gb PC667
7800GT currently running 1192x692(around there)
Currently 250gb but would upgrade 1 or 2TB to meet the need.

I have a good 200-300 movies I would like to have on hard drive so I can now watch my movies like how I listen to my cd collection, through Media Center w/ Vista.

Ideas?

 

[ForumMaster]

a simple common dvd rip you find on the net for a movie is about 700MB. that would be 210GB if you have 300 movies. you obviously plan to use HD, right? the best encoded movies i've seen can be around 2.5-3GBs for 720p for a full length movie. that's using x264 and AC3 audio.

that would be 900GB.
if it's standard DVD's, you could just rip without encoding and play the ISO files with VLC. 300x4.37 = 1311GB

to play the files with MC, i think you'll need to encode the files.

can you tell us if these are regular DVD's , or HD movies?

 

[loup garou]

Official way
My Movies is a bit more advanced, but has a lot of nice features.

As always, The Green Button is the place to go for WMC answers.

 

[corkyg]

I do that with DVD Decrypt and DVD Shrink.

 

[eno]

Thanks for the replies.

Right now 100% of my collection is regular DVD format. Alot of them are single layer DVD's. Eventually I will run HD formats when that time rolls around and works with my setup but right now it's simply to get all my SD movies in close if not full quality.

Yes I would like to use the WMC software to access them hopefully like my CD collection w/ small pictures and movie descriptions.




Thanks for the "Official Way" link! That's exactly what I am wanting to do. If any of you have the time feel free to keep shooting me ideas and links to what works for ya. Thanks.

 

[loup garou]

Originally posted by: eno
Thanks for the replies.

Right now 100% of my collection is regular DVD format. Alot of them are single layer DVD's. Eventually I will run HD formats when that time rolls around and works with my setup but right now it's simply to get all my SD movies in close if not full quality.

Yes I would like to use the WMC software to access them hopefully like my CD collection w/ small pictures and movie descriptions.




Thanks for the "Official Way" link! That's exactly what I am wanting to do. If any of you have the time feel free to keep shooting me ideas and links to what works for ya. Thanks.

BTW, you can still use DVD Shrink or what have you if you want to reduce the filesize for either method if you care to.

I recommend just giving My Movies a try. It really is a great program, especially for being free. I especially like that you can run a server machine to store all your DVDs and just install the client app on your WMC box. I'm planning on building a monster Windows Home Server box, and ripping/running the MyMovies server on it, and installing the client on my WMC box.

Also, if you run the whole package on one box, you can rip from the WMC interface (must have AnyDVD installed to rip protected DVDs, naturally), which is a great feature/timesaver. It goes out and grabs all the metadata, etc. All in a few clicks of the remote from your couch. Very impressive.

 

[eno]

Also, if you run the whole package on one box, you can rip from the WMC interface (must have AnyDVD installed to rip protected DVDs, naturally), which is a great feature/timesaver. It goes out and grabs all the metadata, etc. All in a few clicks of the remote from your couch. Very impressive.

What..... are you kidding me.... gotta go...


If this works.... i'll be back.

 

[eno]

Ok, where is this feature. I am sure it is right in front of me but I had no such luck. Thanks for the tip, I really hope this works.

Also can I take say my Aliens collection for example, edit out all the other stuff and take only the movie file w/ 5.1 DD. Then let WMC rip it into the collection? Will it be able to find the correct MetaData if I change the DVD structure?

 

[loup garou]

Originally posted by: eno
Ok, where is this feature. I am sure it is right in front of me but I had no such luck. Thanks for the tip, I really hope this works.

You can go to the settings in My Movies and enable it to ask you what to do (watch or copy) when you insert a DVD. Or you can just select the DVD in My Movies and click copy.

Also can I take say my Aliens collection for example, edit out all the other stuff and take only the movie file w/ 5.1 DD. Then let WMC rip it into the collection? Will it be able to find the correct MetaData if I change the DVD structure?

hmm...I'm not sure if the dvd id is preserved in that case.

 

[eno]

I have been looking around and so far I do like the My Movies 2 app. I thought you meant there was a built in method without My Movies installed to rip. So far I think ripping on a remote powerful system over to any older dedicated XP pro sharing PC back to my Media Center is the route I will take. I didn't edit this post and so I repeated myself a bunch. Sorry if it doesn't make sense or have no direction.

I have all sorts of areas to figure out.

Should I keep the format VOB? Or should I compress. I want full quality and do not want to see any difference in picture quality. I just know 4-8gb a movie is going to add up quick.

Also wondering what I should do as in storage. I already have an old Athlon XP 2000+ system sharing files and music to my Media Center and currently formatted an 80gb drive for testing with this DVD playback idea. I wonder if I should continue to use this older system for my DVD playback. All my PC's are on a wired lan w/ Gigabite router and NIC's. I think I will do all my extracting w/ my Quadcore over to the old file server and then shared to a mapped drive on the Media Center. Should I just run My Movie 2 as the "server" version on the client PC since my actual server is pretty old.

I am just thinking out loud here. Currently I think my best bet would be to buy an 750gb or 1TB internal drive on my old file server (XP Pro). Mapped the entire drive on the network and then direct all the movies to be store over it. I am concerned about the time it will take to have it all working over a LAN and if I should just install the 1tb drive into my Media Center which will not help with noise in the viewing room or heat which both are issues.

What do you think of this mess?

 

[eno]

Ok, so I have spent way to much time on this tonight. QUick question.

1.) Formats? I want DVD like quality w/ only the movie file but hope to get it around 2-3gb in size but at DVD quality. What should I do? Divx,H264,?
2.) If I wanted to run simply .vob files and compressed somewhat down to a single layer DVD I still would only get a little over 200 dvd's on a 1TB drive. How would I span multiple drives so my library is in one location but I can run multiple drives?

 

[loup garou]

Originally posted by: eno
Ok, so I have spent way to much time on this tonight. QUick question.

1.) Formats? I want DVD like quality w/ only the movie file but hope to get it around 2-3gb in size but at DVD quality. What should I do? Divx,H264,?

Well, I'm not sure what formats My Movies/DVD Library will pick up outside of vobs, mpegs, dvr-ms, and isos. If you convert to divx/xvid/whatever, you'll lose metadata, chapters, etc and things will just show up in the video library.

2.) If I wanted to run simply .vob files and compressed somewhat down to a single layer DVD I still would only get a little over 200 dvd's on a 1TB drive. How would I span multiple drives so my library is in one location but I can run multiple drives?

I think this is the way to go (what I am going to do as well, removing extras, extra languages, etc), especially if you want to burn a disk of the movie in the future without digging out the original.

You can use Vista's symbolic links to make multiple drives appear as one folder or drive.

 

[loup garou]

dp

 

[eno]

Originally posted by: loup garou

Originally posted by: eno
Ok, so I have spent way to much time on this tonight. QUick question.

1.) Formats? I want DVD like quality w/ only the movie file but hope to get it around 2-3gb in size but at DVD quality. What should I do? Divx,H264,?

Well, I'm not sure what formats My Movies/DVD Library will pick up outside of vobs, mpegs, dvr-ms, and isos. If you convert to divx/xvid/whatever, you'll lose metadata, chapters, etc and things will just show up in the video library.

2.) If I wanted to run simply .vob files and compressed somewhat down to a single layer DVD I still would only get a little over 200 dvd's on a 1TB drive. How would I span multiple drives so my library is in one location but I can run multiple drives?

I think this is the way to go (what I am going to do as well, removing extras, extra languages, etc), especially if you want to burn a disk of the movie in the future without digging out the original.

You can use Vista's symbolic links to make multiple drives appear as one folder or drive.

Thanks a bunch for your help. You have made this task very easy and have provided excellent solutions. Thank you and everyone else. Keep checking back if you have time.

-eno

 

[loup garou]

Originally posted by: eno

Originally posted by: loup garou

Originally posted by: eno
Ok, so I have spent way to much time on this tonight. QUick question.

1.) Formats? I want DVD like quality w/ only the movie file but hope to get it around 2-3gb in size but at DVD quality. What should I do? Divx,H264,?

Well, I'm not sure what formats My Movies/DVD Library will pick up outside of vobs, mpegs, dvr-ms, and isos. If you convert to divx/xvid/whatever, you'll lose metadata, chapters, etc and things will just show up in the video library.

2.) If I wanted to run simply .vob files and compressed somewhat down to a single layer DVD I still would only get a little over 200 dvd's on a 1TB drive. How would I span multiple drives so my library is in one location but I can run multiple drives?

I think this is the way to go (what I am going to do as well, removing extras, extra languages, etc), especially if you want to burn a disk of the movie in the future without digging out the original.

You can use Vista's symbolic links to make multiple drives appear as one folder or drive.

Thanks a bunch for your help. You have made this task very easy and have provided excellent solutions. Thank you and everyone else. Keep checking back if you have time.

-eno

Sure thing, let us know how it goes and make sure you post if you discover any helpful tips while setting it up or find any other software/plugins that work better.

PS while fiddling around with My Movies this afternoon I ran into a weird bug, I ripped a DVD to an external USB drive on my WMC box and it throws an error on playback. A little Googling led me to a workaround (map the external drive as a network drive and add that to watched folders) that allowed playback in DVD Library, but not through My Movies. That's as far as I got, as the gf got home and wanted to watch TV, not me fiddling around with software on the TV. Just be aware that there appears to be a bug with ripped DVDs on external drives...

 

[eno]

Good to know about external drives, I was just thinking which way to go internal/external. Also this is copied from the My Movies forums. What do you think of these questions and could you go a little deeper on the multiple hard drive setup. I googled that method you mentioned and it looked rather high tech for what I am doing. Is it rather simple on the Vista machine to set this up?

I generally will be removing all extra's like "behind the scenes", "outtakes", "deleted scenes" , "spanish/french audio" from my DVD collection. I will want to store only the movie it self in w/ english 5.1 audio. I will be using the clone dvd or dvd shrink program to actually edit and take what I want from the DVD disc and then manually set it to compress it in the 75-80% range to help save space on the HD. Does this answer your question? Thanks for helping.

So the main question is : When I rip my DVD using DVD shrink or Clone DVD and take ONLY the movie file I am left with a movie that works exactly the way I want on my hard drive except for the ability to view the chapter names when jumping between them. So what area do I need to save to keep the chapter names intact?




Side questions
A.) Since I plan to keep my video files in the standard .vob format and plan to slightly compress the content does anyone know if one application has better quality for ripping / compressing the content. I know DVD shrink has some extra time consuming features like "Deep Analysis" mode. Any opinions between the programs for quality with only light compression in the 75-80% compress range?

B.) How can I combine two 750gb drives to work as one library? I am undecided on what size drive to buy but I figure I will need two drives regardless if I buy 750gb or 1tb. I need to know how I will make that happen without running a striped raid setup. I want reliable safe ways of storing all these time consuming rips.

 

[eno]

Wow, I think I just found a workable solution for what format to use with descent file size.

Whenever I have used Dvd Shrink in the past I have always attempted to keep my compression as low as possible. To keep the percent as close to 100% when I could. I knew the program could perform additional quality features which would take MUCH longer to rip but I would never bother with those.

Well tonight I decided I would try those features but this time I would compress the movie as MUCH as I could for a easy night and day comparison I thought.

So I rip one of my movies first 2mins in the highest compressed format it would custom allow me to around 48.8% but with Deep Analysis & high quality adaptive error compensation enabled .
Next I would rip the exact same file but with 100% no compression.
Next I simply set them up to be viewed through the Media Center w/ My Movie 2.
I played the two clips back and forth and was very suprised. I am picky and was expecting terrible results but I really could hardly tell the difference.
I thought I must be viewing the same file but I double checked and even tested a different non animated movie with the same side by side comparison.

Now I want the best quality possible but hopefully to keep it within reason with storage solutions. I am hoping to use a single 1TB drive if I could. Based off of normal sizes of DVD's 4-8gb, I assumed I could do no better then around 200 movies at full quality. Well with this new find I really think I will be able to be pleased even running these .vob files at high compression using simply DVD Shrink and using the Deep Analysis & high quality adaptive error compensation features that are normally disabled.

I intially was going to compare a 70% rip at a 100% lossless rip but decided to max it out and my 48.8% rip compared to 100% rip and was hard for picky me to tell the difference while viewing on my 720p TV. I even turned on my decible reader to see if certain audio peak scenes were at lower DBs but they were the same. I couldn't hear a difference between the two either.

Wow , I am a happy camper. This will provide me with a great solution to stay with realible .vob format w/ WMC and at the same time run my movies closer to 2-3gb like I was shooting for. SWEET!

I let you know after more testing if I will still use this.

 

[eno]

Finally 4 months later I am finished ripping my entire collection. I have around 530 titles ripped with DVD shrink w/Deep Analysis & high quality adaptive error compensation enabled. Most compression range from 50-75%. I am using two 1TB drives and have 315gb left on the second drive.

I use the WMC reg edit to allow the DVD LIBRARY. I can see any movies that I have ripped in raw folder format.

I then use MY MOVIES 2 to add title information. I use the manual input option since the auto input was adding wrong information to the collection.

So end result I have two methods to browse through my dvd collection. DVD Library and My Movies 2.

Picture and Audio quality is excellent. I was and still am picky about quality and it is truly hard for me to tell the difference between a movie compressed in half. I did alot of back and forth comparisons and even though the movies still range from 2-4gb a piece that is still enough to allow easy playback and viewing through Media Center.

Too bad it took 4months to complete.

 

[loup garou]

Wow! Big project. Glad to see it worked out for you!

 

[eno]

Originally posted by: loup garou
Wow! Big project. Glad to see it worked out for you!

Your response at the start of this thread is truly what helped the most. Exactly what I was looking for. Thank you very much for the tips.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

I am doing the same sort of thing (although with much less movies I believe). I am saving the normal movies as MP4 and just saving the movie itself, but I'm not sure what to do about the DVDs that require the menus, such as television and episode based DVDz.

I have a lot of TV shows and anime that have episodes on them. Is there a best method for getting these to hard drive for viewing? I'm going to be storing everything on a file server and viewing from machine on the network.