storing dvd collection for MCE use

[Kartajan]

This is my plan;

I have about 200 DVD movies in my collection. What I want to do is make them readily available to my MCE boxes without having to dig out the movie and put it in to the DVD drive. I know there are a multitude of ways to rip them to HDD, but I am wondering what is the best way to proceed..

What I am envisioning is a efficient "rip" to hdd (at full resolution- no reduced resolution to save space), and making one of my machines into a glorified fileserver for my MCE machines to read from.

Best methods? Recommended ripping software? Other relavent comments/ issues?


*Note- I have 3 MCE Machines- 1 in my PC room, a laptop, and a LivingRoom PC that I want to play from, but only the PC room machine has any shot at possessing the required storage capacity; I am thinking 1TB would be just enough...

 

[Kartajan]

anyone?

 

[mikeford]

Don't they make carousels that hold like 400 DVDs?

When I asked the same sort of question, nothing really in response except share the drive. You might want to take a look at the HTPC section of avsforum.com.

The direction for ripping seems to be mpeg4, but thats a moving target.

 

[JAG87]

use virtual dub mod. xvid for video, and ac3 for audio.

extract the streams from your dvd, crop all the excess out of the video. crop black lines and such. dont worry about resolution they are avi files as long as you keep the proper aspect ratio try to get rid of all excess pixels. something common for avi is anywhere between 640x360 and 640x272, respectevely 1.77:1 (16:9) and 2.35:1, it all depends on the aspect ratio of your movie. the width is reduced to 640 because 720 is actually a waste in DVDs, they made it to compensate for the overscan of TV sets, so the image in those extra 80 pixels you usually dont even see on your TV. do 1-pass encoding at high bitrate.

mux the ac3 audio stream into the avi file and output it. and thats it, there you have a nice avi file that looks almost like the original with the exact same audio. you might need ac3filter to play those files in WMP to decode the 5.1 ac3 stream. and btw arm yourself of a large hard drive and a lot of patience. time to encode is roughly 1h per movie.

-JAG


edit
to give you an idea a high bitrate is above 1500. anything below that will be fine for steady pictures, but will be horrible for fast moving pictures and dark scenes. choose wisely according to the amount of space you want to dedicate to your collection.