DVD Archiving

[MacAttack]

I have a Popcorn Hour A100 shipping next week. I have started to backup my DVD collection to HDD. I have been backing everything up using DVD Decrypter. After doing a little research, I read about containers, especially Matroska. I like the idea of having a single file to stream to the Popcorn Hour, but instructions and the ability to create MKV files is baffling me. I have tried several of the applications out there (Handbrake, RiverPast, and a few others). None of these are an easy solution to convert the VOB to a MKV file.

Is there any other container that I should use or should I just keep the VOB files to send to the Popcorn Hour? I would really like a container app that I can point to the directory (c:\DVD\Cars), hit a button, and the MKV gets created and works. I have tried with the other apps and the manual work takes a while, the conversion takes even longer, and the final output fails.

Any help is appreciated.

 

[mc866]

It all depends on how much space you have or would like to use and the limitations of playback with popcorn hour. I'm not that familiar with it but if you have plenty of disc space I would just stick with VOB or ISO so you don't have to mess with encoding all of you dvd's which can be tedious. If you don't have much space you may want to convert to MKV or AVI or some other smaller format but this will take some time to do.

 

[MacAttack]

Thank you. For now, I am not too limited by disc space. I am not archiving my entire collection until next year. I have about 500GB available. I will install a 2TB NAS next Spring and archive the rest of my DVDs.

I played around with the ISO file from DVD Shrink and it worked without issue on the computer. Since PCH supports the ISO format, I will go that route. It only took about 6-8 minutes to convert the VOB to an ISO image.

Thanks for the info.

 

[mc866]

Also I've found imgburn to be best for ripping the DVD directly to iso