dvd formats

probably mkv is your best bet, haven't really played with chapters though.

Me personally I just leave them in folder format (ie video_ts) as its the easiest to store, and easiest to play back.

- Josh

Yeah, given the size/cost of hard drives these days I think the majority are simply copying either the whole disc or the main movie in DVD format without any compression.

i started ripping my dvd tv shows to mkv for simplicity, using makemkv. but the quality is terrible. Even though the file size is about the same.

I wont being doing that again, unless i find a better program for the conversion.

wait.. your complaining about 4.3GB as "huge". What is this 1997 or something???

1TB drive will hold about 230 of those "huge" rips. all for about $90. $0.09/GB. That's $0.39 per rip. Quit your bitchin'...

Some people use xvid to encode the main movie and get it down to about 700mb. However, the quality does suffer. It is still watchable though, if the encoder knows what they are doing.

If it were me, I would just rip the main feature to an .iso without any re-encode. You have to consider if your time is worth the $540 it would cost to store your collection without encoding or pairing down, vs. the $180 with maximum compression. That is a $360 dollar difference that would cost you endless hours to encode 1500 movies properly.

You could find a sale on external 1TB drives for about the same price as the internal ones. Or, buy a different case for your pc. Most cases will hold 4 hard drives or more.

The above are hard drive prices, but you could do it for less with two burners (one read, one write) and spools of dvd+r's.

That last method is only of benefit to a pirate, however, as there is no benefit versus just leaving the discs as purchased. (Edit, well OK, people that have kids or careless spouses might want beater copies.)

This makes no sense at all. Makemkv does NOT do any kind of re-encoding/conversion at all. The original encoded material is left as is (that is why it is just about the exact same size). All it does is take the untouched video and audio streams and re-packages them into an mkv container.

At 1500 discs, it's seriously not worth the time to encode. You're better off building a file server that can scale to future requirements. Right now, I have a 12TB unRAID server (8x1.5TB data HDD). There are two ways I can increase storage - install new drives or replace existing drives with higher capacity ones.

Zagor is right. There is no video/audio quality loss with MakeMKV. Maybe you use different MPEG-2 video decoders (or settings) for DVD and MKV?