In order to make space in the living room, I've started ripping my DVD collection. At the moment, I'm not transcoding them.

Man, those things take up a lot of disk space. I've currently got 3TB storage (+2TB external backup storage) hanging out of the back of my server, and it looks like it won't be enough.

How do other people cope? How am I going to cope when I start ripping Blu-Ray movies?

Note to the cops: I'm not sharing them. This is merely format-shifting.

You can use DVD Shrink to reduce the size while still maintaining decent quality - as well as dropping whatever extras and languages tracks you don't want. I do this at the time of ripping.

I just deal with it by buying progressively larger drives. 1TB drives are fairly cheap now and the 1.5TB ones aren't too bad either.

I try not to think about what I'd do when it gets to the point that I have to do Blu-Ray...

Hard drives are never cheap enough, and most people like us, only look at them as cheap from a historical perspective. When you're buying 6 drives at a time it's till a bit of a hit, especially if you're going to have some space dedicated to redundancy and/or backups. And we can' forget the price of enclosures/controllers to be able to connect those drives.

I have a ReadyNAS with 4x 1.5TB and 2x 2TB right now configured with dual drive redundancy, for a total of almost 5.5TB of usable storage and while I still have plenty free, I'd really prefer to have double that with an identical array set aside to back it up.

What are you guys using to rip DVDs? DVD Shrink has been able to handle any disc I've used it with so far.

I'm not rpping them yet, for this precise reason: I'd need a lot of drives for storage and backup. I was about to start my ripping project, actually, last year, but then I got a BlueRay and I gave up. Of course, I still have some shelf space for my collection, I estimate for few years to come, and that allows me to postpone.

But, I would definitely start ripping them now, just for the convenience of it, if it wasn't that storage space is still an issue.

And time. It takes a lot of it to rip a BluRay.

This is exactly my problem. Not the disks themselves, although they're not free, but the enclosures. I have only a limited amount of space in my hall cupboard, so a massive tower case won't fit. I also want 2 backup copies of everything (one near-line, one off-line), which means buying 3x the disks.

At the moment, I have 5TB (1x2TB, 3x1TB) in external USB drives hanging out of the back of my Acer Revo R3610. I've got 3TB configured as on-line storage, and 2TB configured as on/near-line backup.

I've got ~250 DVDs, each of which will take ~6GB. That's ~1.5TB, before I even allow for extra DVDs (and the other stuff that lives on that volume). Without care, incremental backups could result in using twice that.



AnyDVD and CloneDVD (although DVD Shrink seems just as good). I'm stripping out the bits I don't need, but I've not looked at transcoding yet. DVDs are MPEG-2, right? Maybe I should transcode to MPEG-4 or similar?

When in doubt, just wait a few years. At the point where it's $100 to buy a 10TB hard drive (what, maybe five years from now?), then ripping the whole collection will seem like a no-brainer.

Not very likely for me. I have around 1050 DVDs/BluRays (not including all the extra discs) now. In 5 years I expect to have quite a few more, so it will take looong time to rip them all...

Stig

For me, I've decided to drop all the extras for DVD's that I rip. Then I transcode just the feature to MP4 using Handbrake. It's quick and easy, and I can queue up a whole bunch of videos and just let it chug away at them.

I have only started with my DVD's, and have only done a few HD DVDs & Blu-rays. I currently have 5x1TB in RAID 5, ~3.6TB, and only have about 700 GB free. I have plenty that I haven't transcoded yet, and transcoding to MP4 generally cuts the files in half.

Roger, I've recently started this process as well, and I understand how daunting it is. I've done about 70 discs so far, but I might stop and even delete some of the backups I've made already.

For me, it became a philosophical question: how much do I really need these DVDs? I looked at my collection of around 250 movies and realized the following: in the past three years, I would estimate that the number of times I've watched any of the films in my own collection comes to around 20. I'd bet a few of those viewings were also the same movie.

Once I thought about that, I decided that I could do without them. If I'm ever in the mood to watch Highlander or The Last Boy Scout, I'll just throw them in the Netflix queue. Sure, it's nicer to be able to watch them on the spot, but it's not worth it to me to keep Three Kings on a shelf literally collecting dust for years and years.

I did, however, rip several movies that I really love or that I just can't find anywhere (have any of you seen Gleaming the Cube? Well it's $45 on Amazon!).

For my rips, I decided that I just don't need the special features anymore, and I'm fine with just commentary tracks. So I decided to stick with making MKV files, which let me keep all those commentary tracks, while taking out the foreign language tracks. I first rip the DVD with DVD Decrypter, then convert them with Handbrake, which does an excellent job at compressing the video without losing too much quality.

I'd certainly ignore backing up DVD rips. They're huge and easily recoverable from the disc. Yeah, it'll take some time, but I can't think of a situation where you really need to watch Repo Man right this instant.

DVDs are MPEG2. You can save a ton of space for the feature transcoding to MPEG4 - a 2 hour movie will easily fit into 700MB-1.5GB with very decent quality.

However, using DVDShrink, you can reduce the size of the resulting MPEG2 without transcoding - it does a very good job. Not down to 1GB, but you can easily shave a 6GB movie to 4GB or so.

A big issue using Handbrake (which I also quite like) is that it has no batch capabilities - yes, you can queue, but you have to add items one at a time to the queue.

As far as big storage goes... NAS RAID enclosure.

I also have an issue with video quality. It may very well be psychological, but, from my own perspective, that does not chage much: I do not want to decrease quality in favour of disk space. I feel that if I buy a DVD or a BD, then I do because I want that level of video and audio quality, and the extra feautres as well. Decreasing quality, or getting rid of the extra feature, is just not appealing to me.
Definitely, I am not saying it is "wrong" to transcode or strip out what is unneeded, in any way. Actually, it is quite logical in many cases.
I just happen do dislike the idea to the point I find the whole effort way unappealing unless I manage to get ALL on HDD.
Which means, in my case, that I do prefer to wait when storage space is more and cheaper/MB.
In fact, I ripped my entire audio collection into 320kbps, no filter, top quality MP3s just to be as close as I can to the original, for that same reason. If I did not find FLAC just as unpractical as to get the original CD (I have no portable player that plays FLAC, for example), I'd go flac and re-rip everything. And I may end up doing so at some point in time.

So, silly as it can be, or irrational, I need to have all on HDD. I am actually sorry it is not yet practical to have a PDF or some other media to replicate the booklet that I can store next to my MP3s...

Easily resolved with a script the transcodes new FLACs to matching MP3s.

I'm with you on this one. The DVD is the backup. I don't even back up my MP3s, since I can re-rip everything from CD (or re-torrent, in the case of the SXSW material). I should, come to think of it, back up the ID3 tags info, so I don't have to re-edit it all, which was the most time-consuming part of ripping them.

Yes, but see, that's not the issue. I would still need to keep two collections - FLAC and MP3 - one of which only is actually practically useful. In my current setup listening to FLAC files would be just as inconvenient as listening to CDs directly, if not more: I mostly listen to mp3s from my car stereo (no flac capability there) or from my Zune (same as above); so I don't get any particular benefit from a FLAC collection per se; it would just be wasted disk space.

The moment I can actually listen and use the flacs directly, I'd convert my cd collection to flac. I am postponing getting a nice audio system ay home. Once I decide myself to get that, coupled with an htpc or logitech network players, flac would become a very interesting option to satisfy my irrational need for lossless.

Because, again: do I actually perceive the difference in audio quality between flac and mp3_320kbps_cbr_nofilters_q5_lame_encoding? I doubt I would even on a superb audio system.

You must find reripping a more pleasurable experience than I do. I vowed never to have to rerip again, so when I ripped all my CDs last year they went straight to FLAC and transcoded to MP3.

I actually agree, but there's a time issue, there. When I ripped my CDs years ago, when I got my first empeg, I made the mistake to make them MP3. So, the point is exactly that: I am going to re-rip only when the effort is worth. Re-ripping to flac now would be a useless pain. I'd rather spend my time in finding some decent photo collection organizer and start tagging. That, too, is a lot of fun (!!), but I'd get some more tangible benefit from it right now.

Our solution to DVDs taking up too much space was to get one of these

My wife is the big movie person and i'm with Matt buying them is just a waste. We subscribe to Netflix and almost never watch a movie more than once.

Weird. I've just begun doing this as well. I've been using DVDShrink and Handbrake and going to mpeg-4. I also get rid of all features and additional languages. Quality seems fine to me.

Because of the extremely harsh conditions I'm living in, my DVD's kept getting ruined, despite my efforts to keep them nice, so I decided to go digital so that hopefully can keep my bits from degrading. I've started with all my daughter's Dora DVD's since they seem to disintegrate the fastest.

That's why I've been messing with Boxee in the other thread. Hoping to use that to play them all. (Not thrilled...probably will check out Myth next to see where it's gone in the last couple years since I played with it). For now I'm just using iTunes to index them.

MythTV has moved along A LOT in the past two years.
I still heavily patch my own copy, to improve GUI
navigation with the remote control, and other goofs
they've made in the UI.

But it isn't all that bad as distributed, either.

For DVD rips, I use DVDFAB-Platinum.
Yes, it's payware.
Yes, it's MS-Win based.

And yes, it works extremely well, and is well maintained.

Cheers

Ah, I think we found the source of that cold front

I believe hell just froze over.

I second DVDFAB as well. I have been using the paid version for about two years ans I just purchased the blu ray license as well. It is very well organized. It will rip a BD(main feature) to MKV in less than 40 min. I have been storing these on a HP MediaSmart server. The main reason is that with a toddler I figured it was easier and safer to just queue up a movie instead of letting the little one scratch the hell out of physical media. I learned from a colleague who bought 4 copies of Finding Nemo....then smartened iup.

My copy of DVDFab is all updated to the latest 8.xx version.

But.. I still keep the older 7.xx version installed too,
because it has features that were made "optional" (+$$) in 8.xx.

Cheers

I've been using Pavtube Blu Ray ripper. Seems to work well enough. I might check out DVDFab given the glowing reviews here . . .

We've used up about 2TB of storage for our media, and I'm about to get another 2TB external drive. We are completely digital now- I can't imagine going back to having to insert physical media anymore. I mean, that would mean getting up and crossing the room . . .

Ah we're so spoiled!

Anyway- our answer is that we are using external hard drives. Seems to work well enough. And yes, we are ripping Blu Rays now- they can get quite big!

Oh yeah, I meant to mention that for our one year old, having a couple of seasons of Sesame Street and a season of Blue's Clues instantly available at the push of a few buttons is amazing.

My wife is going out of town with the kiddo for two weeks- before she goes I'm going to sync up all his shows on the hard drive of the AppleTV and she'll take it with her. Won't be able to do that with the new Apple TV!

Just FYI, Slysoft, creator of fine software like AnyDVD and CloneDVD announced today that as of January 1st 2011, they will discontinue their 'lifetime' update subscription. This of course means that until that date, you'll still be able to buy the software with lifetime update subscription, which I'll do for sure! - I was going to buy this software anyway, just not yet... guess I'll speed up that 'ripping project' by a few months.

I've used CloneDVD before and it did exactly what I wanted it to do: making exact rips while allowing me to the choose weather I would like to keep all that extra junk (menus, commercials, FBI warnings, extra languages and subs,...) or just toss it. I then saved my rips as one big ISO file (which can be played by most media players no problem) which starts playing immediately when the file is selected.

This case (and bundle) look interesting.
The size of a toaster, with a big/quiet 140mm fan, and standard (aka. "replaceable") components.

CDN$300 Mini-ITX 6+ Drive NAS box. (drives not included)

With 6x2TB drives, plus a 2.5" boot/system drive, it could hold a lot of ripped discs.