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Originally Posted by localhost
Ok, I have about 120 retail DVDs that I own and they take up so much shelf space. I am looking for a way i can make a copy of them on my hard drive and be able to just call up the movie I want to watch and have it play on the TV. Can BTV do this? Would I have to convert the movie into another format or can I keep it as an ISO or what?
Thanks for your help.
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Ok, well, guess I'm in the minority, but I'm in the process of doing this for convenience -- and it's mostly for the kid movies anyway, which tend to get scattered around between various rooms in the house and the minivan (not exactly the most exciting excuse, I know, but it's true).
I use a little program called DVD Shrink, it's free, only takes a half a brain to use, and does exactly what you want. It takes half an hour or so to rip a DVD, but it goes in the background and you can walk away and do something else, so it's not like you're wasting time. Your average DVD is about 6GB on disk, so you do need a LOT of space. I just picked up two 750GB drives, which is more than I need for my collection (this *might* hold your collection of 120). I'm using them in a RAID 1 array, so that's my solution to the HDD failure problem (although it's not a perfect one).
Lots of ways to play them back (VLC works, so does WinDVD), but since you're posting here, you can use Beyond Media (not BeyondTV) with the DVD Library plugin. Very nice solution, very wife and kid friendly.
edit: files are kept in the native .vob format (which I think is mpeg2 for video, audio varies). There are some options for compression (hence the Shrink part of the name), but I've never looked too carefully at them. And your 750GB RAID 5 array will be more than up to the task
