Question for those who rip their BDs

Storage space depends on the BR, but a 40GB is certainly possible. No storage racks, just a couple 1.5 TB HDD. Once I own enough BR to fill up these drives, 3TB drives will probably be crossing the $100 mark.

I personally only rip movies that I intend to watch again and those are not that many. I have maybe 10 BD's that I've ripped since they were playable on PCs.

Most of the BD that I rip, I take only the movie, no extra or menu. Most of the time those end up below 25 gig and once converted to AVCHD they can be burn back on a BD-R or BD-RE, but I keep them on HDD. Hard drive space is cheap these day and Seagate just announced a 3TB HDD today.

Not all movies are worthy of taking up room on the HDDs. I only rip ones I will watch all or parts of often. I might also put new ones on then delete after I watch.

Lately I will rip an exact copy for the first viewing and after if it is worthy I will rip only the main movie and language. Avatar came in at about 38gigs and brave heart 32, the rest are in the 20-25 range.

I don't have a BD-ROM drive so I can't rip any Blu Ray movies, but I have been put a few of my HD DVDs onto my HTPC. I bought a big bundle of HD DVDs off of eBay a few months ago (50 movies for $60) and thought that it would be nice to have a bunch of HD content. Out of all of my HD DVDs, only four of them are on my media PC in full 1080p (Shooter, Hot Rod, Mallrats, and The 40 Year Old Virgin) right now. There are several that I want to add but I don't watch them that often (Red Dragon, The Big Lebowski, Mystery Men, and others). I'd definitely want to compress those if I were to put them on my HTPC.

I definitely agree that it is much nicer to only keep the films that you'll watch several times. Storage is cheap but huge rips definitely add up. My HD DVDs are between 12GB and 20GB (only the movie with the 5.1 audio track) so it isn't a huge burden, though. I won't be doing many more until I add another storage drive.

I would really like to start compressing them, though. If I could get them down to between 4 and 8 GBs per movie, I'd be quite happy. I'm still trying to find a good solution for that. That would really expand your options for keeping a lot of good quality without having to invest a lot of money into storage arrays. A lot of people would say that compressing a Blu Ray rip should be avoided but sometimes it's necessary.

StinkPiece what are you using for the hd dvd rips? I have over 200 and have had a tough time converting them to a usefull format

In the first place, I only buy movies I plan on watching again so the number of Blu-ray discs I need to rip is relatively small. For others, Netflix BD rentals are fine.

Well I'm a movie collector, 1500 titles and growing... So I tend to keep what I buy and I buy a lot. I do once in a while cleanup the bad encodes or the real stinker but foremost I rip for convenience and as a safety mesure, YMMV.

I have a server with 13 terabytes of disk space (about a quarter full) so I still have space to grow. And in the event that it fills up I can add another ProBox 4 HDD usb bay and fill it with 4x 1TB or 2TB drives and continue.

I use AnyDVD HD to rip an unencrypted version of the movie's folder structure to my hard drive. From there, I use TSMuxeR GUI to select the *.EVO files for the main movie. I deselect the extra audio tracks (leaving only the one that I want for the sake of size). TSMuxeR GUI allows you to then create an M2TS / TS file that will play in XBMC. That's uncompressed, though, so it will be quite large.

I haven't gotten anything to work for compressing the video stream. Handbrake would be the easiest solution but it doesn't like the audio stream so I can only do the video. I'm going to compress a video stream tonight and see if I can mux the resulting H.264 MKV with the original 5.1 AC3. I'm going to keep it at 1920x1080 but lower the bitrate from 19Mbps to about 6Mbps. Hopefully that will result in a good looking movie without being so large. The last time I tried something like this, the audio/video sync was way off, though, so I'm not going to expect any miracles.

I've been searching for a straightforward and easy-to-follow guide on the subject for a while now but haven't gotten anywhere. I have also tried some more lengthy guides but I always run into a problem somewhere along the line. I suppose it doesn't help that I could definitely stand to learn a thing or two about video encoding.

Most of mine are 25-30GB. I usually use anothereac3toGUI (http://www.curtpalme.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17002) and just take the main movie + HD audio track. Works like a charm. Here's a good guide: http://www.mediasmartserver.net/2010...er-eac3to-gui/

As for storage, this is a real dillemma. I've nearly filled a 1TB drive and am contemplating building a 5x2TB RAID array in either a NAS or Drobo. Expensive but perhaps necessary.

I only rip Concert Blurays and any movie I would watch more then once every 6 months which is a very small number maybe 3-5 a year. I rip all my concert DVDs because I usally only watch part of a performance, about an hour per disk so I can go through 5-6 concert DVDs in a day on weekends.

Nope. Just a few 1.5TB - 2TB drives in a separate 'server' in the basement. Considering how many movies you can fit on 1TB - 2TB drives and the price of those drives, I figure it costs about $2 to store a blu-ray movie online (not counting the initial cost of building the separate server, which you don't necessarily have to do). I think that's worth it.

I would like to store all of my movies on a media server but after experimenting with various programs, the easiest being Make MKV, it just seemed like too much of a hassle to rip BR movies.

I'm still debating a prebuilt server of trying to build one on my own. I want about 10tb of space (5x 2tb drives). It would also hold DVD rips and music in FLAC format.

With AnyDVD, it's two or three clicks to rip to iso and that's it.

I've never used an .iso myself. Aren't they big files? And have to be "mounted"?

An iso is simply the disc itself. It's a 1:1 copy. Slysoft makes a program called Virtual Clone Drive that can mount the iso. Some movie management programs will automatically mount the iso using VCD. I currently use the MyMovies plugin within Windows Media Center which performs the auto-mount.

Mounting is automatic with file association in windows.

As for the size, ISO or MKV, blu-ray will depend on what you rip to iso, full or movie only. But in ISO you won't waste time reencoding and you won't lose anything or any function like chapters, FF and REW.

And if you find that they take too much place or that they wouldn't suffer from too much degradation by being rencoded you can always do it at a later date by mounting the iso and running it in your favorite BR ripping/reencoding software to convert it to an x264/flac mkv.

Thanks. One more thing to look into since the TV season is just about done. I was already planning on looking into some software upgrades and such as well as the server situation. I've downloaded the programs from the links above to see if I want to got that route but I can also look into the .iso method. Thanks.

I like the sound of the iso especially since I don't re-encode or compress movies at all.

I convert all mine to MKV, just keeping the main (untouched) 1080P video stream, main HD audio stream (coverted to FLAC), chapters and any forced subs. Most rips tend to be 15-20GB. Keep them all on my WHS (6TB at the moment), and stream over the local Gb LAN. MediaBrowser controls the front end within 7MC. I use MPC-HC for all HD playback. Seamless and intuitive.

That's the kind of thing that I want to do. Have all the media on an external server like an HP or Acer and then have it connected to the HTPC and run through 7MC or/and SageTV.

Just some hints for iso's. With anydvd hd you can rip the entire disc to iso. With DVD FAB hd you also have the option to rip just the main movie to iso (no extras or menu but untouched video, the audio you want, and chapters.) Daemon tools lits is a good free iso mounting tool. The only thing bad thing with iso's is that they will only work in blu ray play back players like Powerdvd, ect.

Remuxing is the easiest way to it. Remux the main movie with TSmuxer in m2ts or .ts with just the main HD audio and main movie + subs, and you save 10-15GB per movie. Big harddrives are cheap as dirt also.

Don`t go into encoding if you don`t know what bframes is or what reference frames means. A quality encode takes time.

+1

This is how I do it and it works just about perfectly. I average closer to 25-30gig for just the movie and english audio/subtitle tracks though.

Only minor issue seems to be with Disney movies. The last two movies I ripped turned out great except for a few small scenes where they cut to signs on the screen, they were written in Spanish! lol. Audio was fine, weird. Not a big deal, I probably just need to re-rip and manually pick a different video track or something.

I ended up buying another 2tb drive and will eventually build a server when this one gets close to filling up.

Thanks for the help guys. I'll check into those options.