Looking to archive my DVD collection

[MoMeanMugs]

I have over 900 DVD's that I'd like to make digital copies of. They're packed away in boxes, and I'd like to keep it that way. It's so much nicer having everything at my fingertips on my computer. I'm looking for something where I can rip just the movie, 5.1 track (no need for the 2.0 or foreign languages), and subtitles, if necessary. I'd like to leave it in a format that can also be streamed to my 360 or PS3. I'm sure the default MPEG format would be fine, but what other options are there that don't sacrifice IQ? They willbe played back on a 1080p display, so I don't want to see blockiness from recompression. A bonus would be to have them all indexed on the HDD and have a description that would show in Media Center. Anyone have any recommendations on software to do this? I'm not sure if anything like that even exists. Maybe there's a combination of software that would work.

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

Handbrake will do what you need. You're going to need a lot of disk space.
I'm currently in the process of doing this with all of my TV shows on DVD and just with all of Star Trek, Stargate (minus universe), Highlander the series, FireFly, Miracles, Alien Nation, and Red Dwarf and I'm at 500GB. This is with each 45 minute episode at around 350MB.
I still haven't tackled, shows like Lost, Heroes, Babylon 5, Criminal Minds, and a slew of other shows my GF has that is easily double what I have. this doesn't even take into account the movies on DVD which will be around 800MB-1GB each.

If you are going to do this it's going to take a long time. The slowest part of the process is ripping the disk. I don't have any super computers so you might be able to do this faster, but I'm using 2 desktops and 2 laptops to do all of this. I currently have 6TB of space across the 2 desktops that are storing all of this.
Don't forget that you will want a mirror copy of all this data. You can either RAID it or as I prefer to keep my backup on a 2nd computer that is on another circuit as to eliminate PSU taking out everything in the RAID.

 

[IGemini]

That's a good place to start. Make no mistake, complete archiving will be a long process. The only thing I don't agree is with ripping the slowest process. Ripping a DVD with a full-speed drive will take 10-15 minutes. Unless you're sporting a Sandy Bridge with QuickSync ability or a high-performing Bloomfield CPU (i7), encoding will take longer.

With my setup using the same methods mentioned I'll get somewhere around 100~120 fps in the encoding process, which means it'll take roughly 1/4 the amount of time to encode a movie at 24 fps as it would if I were just watching it. A 100 minute movie would encode in about 25 minutes in my config. You have a Q9300 right? It'll take slightly longer than that.

 

[Zedtom]

I have no technical advice to offer, but I would like to comment about the archiving of entertainment media.

The time and effort involved in creating a video library on your media pc is worth it if you are doing it because you want simplicity and convenience when sitting down to enjoy a movie. If you are doing it to impress people or wanting to make it easy for your guests to watch movies, you need to use some planning.

You should compile a complete list and carefully consider how many times you've viewed each one and try to be honest about the desire to ever watch it again. Don't think to yourself that somebody is going to come over some night and ask if you have a certain movie that they are dying to see. They probably have a copy of their own and they don't know what to choose. You need to edit down your collection and keep in mind that if it isn't on the list, it's just down the hall in its original package in storage.

 

[Claudius-07]

Although I love Handrbrake... it does take a while to encode etc, depending on settings. An other option could be DVDFAB (http://www.dvdfab.com/download.htm) free version. This will allow you for a period (like 30 days I think) to rip your movies just the way you want. You can simply RIP them or RIP and encode them. The good thing I like about DVDFAB is that if you have an NVidia card supporting CUDA ... i cannot express to you how fast it will rip if you enable CUDA hardware for the encoding and decoding. If you really want to do it fast, that is the best way I can think off. ALSO DVDFAB with one of their addons removes the copyrights from the DVD by default. Just download their free PASSKEY.

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

That's a good place to start. Make no mistake, complete archiving will be a long process. The only thing I don't agree is with ripping the slowest process. Ripping a DVD with a full-speed drive will take 10-15 minutes. Unless you're sporting a Sandy Bridge with QuickSync ability or a high-performing Bloomfield CPU (i7), encoding will take longer.

With my setup using the same methods mentioned I'll get somewhere around 100~120 fps in the encoding process, which means it'll take roughly 1/4 the amount of time to encode a movie at 24 fps as it would if I were just watching it. A 100 minute movie would encode in about 25 minutes in my config. You have a Q9300 right? It'll take slightly longer than that.

What settings are you using?
I do 2 pass encoding using the native res of the source file. I set it up for each 45 minute epsiode to use 350MB and the quality is close enough that you can't tell. With a Athlon II x4 640 and 4GB RAM I'm getting 220fps.
On my E2200 box with 2GB ram, I get 150fps.
I'm not taking DVD video and trying to turn it into h.264 as there is no benefit to it.

The above numbers are if I rip the vobs to the HDD and convert from there. If I convert straight from DVD it takes about 2x as long, but I'm using slimline optical drives which are slower.

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

Although I love Handrbrake... it does take a while to encode etc, depending on settings. An other option could be DVDFAB (http://www.dvdfab.com/download.htm) free version. This will allow you for a period (like 30 days I think) to rip your movies just the way you want. You can simply RIP them or RIP and encode them. The good thing I like about DVDFAB is that if you have an NVidia card supporting CUDA ... i cannot express to you how fast it will rip if you enable CUDA hardware for the encoding and decoding. If you really want to do it fast, that is the best way I can think off. ALSO DVDFAB with one of their addons removes the copyrights from the DVD by default. Just download their free PASSKEY.

Have you seen how much DVDfab costs to buy.
I prefer to use DVDDecrypter and build up few seasons on one drive, then set handbrake and let er rip, er i mean encode everything and dump it into my storage pool.
Then Robocopy mirrors that out to the secondary storage machine.

 

[IGemini]

What settings are you using?

Same idea for file size (700MB for a movie), single-pass x264. I preferred DivX format for playback compatibility though it has been dropped in Handbrake 0.9.3, I'll probably end up redoing the rip though it doesn't look like one.

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

Same idea for file size (700MB for a movie), single-pass x264. I preferred DivX format for playback compatibility though it has been dropped in Handbrake 0.9.3, I'll probably end up redoing the rip though it doesn't look like one.

Ahh, that's why it is slower for you. Yo uare using x.264.
I tried that and didn't see any improvment in the video quality.
Try doing mp4 and see how it turns out. I bet your encode times will go up quite a bit and the quality of the video won't be changed.
I can do the standard settings in Handbrake and the files work on everyhing I've tried, and I use an Xbox360 for a media extender in the living room.

 

[smitbret]

Ahh, that's why it is slower for you. Yo uare using x.264.
I tried that and didn't see any improvment in the video quality.
Try doing mp4 and see how it turns out. I bet your encode times will go up quite a bit and the quality of the video won't be changed.
I can do the standard settings in Handbrake and the files work on everyhing I've tried, and I use an Xbox360 for a media extender in the living room.

Agree, use the .mp4 setting in Handbrake instead of x264. Just don't get too greedy with compression, I like to figure about 700mb per hour of movie. Also, for maximum compatibility with Xbox 360, you'll need to downsample the sound to 2-channel stereo, 128kb/2 aac.

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

Agree, use the .mp4 setting in Handbrake instead of x264. Just don't get too greedy with compression, I like to figure about 700mb per hour of movie. Also, for maximum compatibility with Xbox 360, you'll need to downsample the sound to 2-channel stereo, 128kb/2 aac.

I use 160kb/stereo/48khz and my xbox likes it.

 

[Gooberlx2]

There are numerous methods to use Media Center and various players like xbmc, boxee, wd live (I think), etc... with ISOs. So consider that method if you have the space, and want to retain full quality with menus and features.

Lot of info at http://www.hack7mc.com/

 

[smitbret]

I use 160kb/stereo/48khz and my xbox likes it.

My bad, I should have been more clear. Bitrate won't matter, as long as it's 2 channel aac. I just haven't ever found a reason to go more than 128 kb/s with aac 2 channel.

 

[MoMeanMugs]

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm going to start playing around with some of these tools to see what works best for me. I need to figure out whether I want to get a NAS or just put my drives in my computer. What do you guys use for storage?

 

[MoMeanMugs]

To answer a couple of the other questions:

Yes, I have a Q9300.
This will be for ease of use for myself. I'm not doing this to impress guests.

 

[Emulex]

yeah you will find the x264 and mp4 require a bit more work to even come close to a mpeg-2 dvd quality. then you get it all looking great with multipass and have to deal with sync issues due to variable bitrate fun stuff.

 

[notposting]

My method is ridiculously storage heavy, but with the cost of storage what it is...meh.

I use a WHS and MyMovies/AnyDVD setup. Rips are in folder format and duplicated :awe:

MyMovies provides the metadata information and I use it in 7MC. Probably >98% of the movies have been in there already. You can get points for adding new movies or filling in missing information or making improvements (correcting synopsises, better cover scans).

Bonuses to the folder format are that on the MC machine I have full DVD menus, I did have to setup the HTPC to handle live transcoding to the Media Center Extenders. Negatives are the gigantic file sizes obviously.

 

[0roo0roo]

waste of effort.
dvd is so inferior to bluray...just rent bluray or something. if it is worth watching again..let alone on a 1080p display...it is worth watching it the right way. investing more time and energy into dvd is just a dead end.

you will be using countless hours archiving this

when this exists

http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u98/adzez/More pix/Sound Of Music/25ad57c9.png
http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u98/adzez/More pix/Sound Of Music/28803731.png
http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u98/adzez/More pix/Sound Of Music/473cea1f.png
http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u98/adzez/More pix/Sound Of Music/ccb80322.png

so just rent a bluray when you feel like watching something. arching dvd is like making "backup" copies of vhs...