1200 DVDs and counting, need help storing them all

You don't really need a HTPC, just a player that can read files off attached storage. Ripping DVDs to HDD is seemingly the preferred method these days, so you're not the first to consider this issue.

Right now, HDDs are premium priced, and this is your main issue for now. 1200 DVDs could consume 6-8 TB of HDD space.

There are other methods, like converting the main movie to MPEG-4 (MKV) that will reduce the space needed by 50%, but this consumes easily 4x more time than a simple rip, 10x if you have a slow PC. A simple rip to ISO file is the fast, easy way but you need a device that can read ISO files. Ripping to folder structure is just as quick but support for folder structures is rare and you wind up only being able to play the VOB files.

Get a cheap DVD burner that can rip at 12-16x (some have a speed lock on video discs) and you can rip them pretty quick. But you can spread it out over a few months and just do a few at a time. It's not like there's a rush.

Also consider the obvious: Storing on HDDs is not secure unless you have 2 copies. Failing to back up your rips will eventually result in the loss of all that work. So now we're at 12-16 TB of space.

But HDDs are great to use. You can organize films by drive, then folders to make locating them easy. A $2 plastic drive case allows you to label them and stack on a shelf for storage. A HDD docking station can hold up to 4 drives at a time and make them all accessible to a player.

Food for thought.

Sony VGP-XL1B / Powerfile + AnyDVD + PowerExplorer + 1/2/3TB HDD's -> Batch ripping.

PowerExplorer $$:
(http://www.mammothi.com/index.php?show_aux_page=12)
dvdMassRip $0:
http://www.mperfect.net/dvdMassRip/
Media Changer $0:
Find the thread here at AVSForum for the authors software
MyMovies $$:
google mymovies

you should be able to find sony/powerfiles on ebay/amazon. maybe $100-$300 price range?

good luck

Ripping 1000 DVD should go by pretty quick. They don't take up much space compared to BDs (I have over 1100 BD ISOs) You can get "MY Movies" and rip up to five discs concurrently. THis is what I did with my BD ISOs. I was doing full BD rips at up to 5 discs concurrently. And with DVDs it will go by very quickly since they are so small at only 8.5GB or less.. Just rip 10 to 20 a day and in a few weeks you will have your entire collection ripped.

Maybe you could add more DVD readers and rip several at a time. The main bottleneck would probably be bandwidth of your hard drives.

Just get bigger shelves. LOL

Ripping five DVDs concurrently is no problem for a hard drive.

Even if you could read each DVD at 16X read speeds for the entire disc, that is only a 21MB/s(168mb/s) read rate.

A BD drive will be read at BDs at faster data rates. I'll rip 3 BDs concurrently to my unRAID over my network at full speed.(I'm using a cache drive in my unRAID)

The only problem is legality. In US (at least), Bill Clinton signed a law that prohibits decrypting the DVD/BR's (even if you "own" them). So no other storage is allowed but the optical discs.
Of course, who cares, but those are our elected officials at work, making laws for whoever pays their campaign ads.
Others are in the same situation - Canada, EU, UK, France.

My computer has 2 disk drives. My cd / dvd and my blu-ray drive. I was ripping two movies at a time. I would rip about 30 movies in less than two hour to my hard drive, which each movies was between 4 gb to 8 gb. I would then use Handbrake to rip the main movies only with subtitles, and I would queue them all and leave the computer over night. Some time my computer would finish everything in about 10 hours. Other times, it would take about 16 hours

But not I'm done, and I've got a folder with the original movies saved in an external 2 tb hard drive (about 150 movies SD movies), and I still got 1 tb free. However, I've got all 150 movies save in my computer as M4V and the total space use is 195 gb. The quality of the video is excellent, and the sound at the moment is only stereo since I haven't got my media players yet

Oh and congrats on the house. Do no forget to wire it with cat54 or cat6...its just faster and better

Another option for the lazy or time limited folks with a bit of extra money is to "hire" their kids & their friends to rip the discs for you. Helps the kiddies learn the value of earning their paycheck instead of mom and dad giving them an allowance, notwithstanding the legality of ripping.

Get an 2TB external HDD for them and hand them a box of 200 discs to rip with a payout to the kid of say $20 or whatever you like. Easy money for them and they likely already know how to do it.

I've got 1526 DVD isos right now, and that takes up 9.1TB. When I did the ripping, I could usually fit about 140 images on a 1TB drive, so you should be able to fit 400-450 on a 3TB drive.


reencoding will save space, but I don't think it's worth the extra ripping time. Also, you should really look through the video to compare it to the original, to be sure that there aren't scenes that'll require higher bitrates.

In my opinion, if you absolutely need to save space, it's better to rip the main movie to mkv, without reencoding, using programs like MakeMKV.


Personally, I prefer full disc rips to iso. But that's mainly because I want to make sure that I don't ever need to use the physical discs again. I also think a single file per disc is cleaner than folders. Mediaplayers that support DVD isos are also pretty common, so I would hold that against iso-ripping.

Question about the PowerFile C200. This device seems to have dual DVD ROM drives.
Are these drives the same as the sony which is region locked to R1 and anydvd cannot do anyhting about it, or are you able to change the region of the 2 drives at will on the powerfiles?

thanks

I just ripped 600+ DVDs.
Some caveats:
Not all DVDs have unique volume names.
Some DVDs have no volume names.
Many DVDs have nondescript volume names.

I built a box with 8 BD readers, and ripped 8 at a time. I sat at the console overseeing the process and renaming the directories.

That's why "My Movies" is a nice option since it's an automated process. It allows you to rip 5 BDs or DVDs concurrently. All you do is stick the discs in and "My Movies" does the rest. It creates the folder, puts in cover art, fan art and NFOs and when finished ejects the disc. I would do 15 each week day. Five before I left for work, five when I got home, and five before going to bed. I only needed to remove the discs and insert them. Everything else was automated.
Then I would periodically check them out to make sure everything was OK. Everything was fine at least 98% of the time. Sometimes I would need to manually get the coverart or fan art, or NFOs.

"My Movies" was a great solution when I had hundreds of BDs to rip. But now that I'm done, and only discs peridocially, I use IMG Burn(with any DVD HD still running in the background) and Ember to create the NFOs, cover art, and fan art.

I rip all my blurays and dvd's to iso.
if you have access to a laptop rip to that and your computer and you will half the time.
I have a external usb 2.0 hard drive connected to the laptop--when all are done or hdd filling up I transfer them to appropiate drives thru my main computer--dvd horror--dvd action--bluray action etc
Also take a mwsnap of all my drives and print out--if you loose a drive you know what you lost.Very simple to do.I write in pen everytime I add a movie to a catagory so its up to date
I use dvdprofiler program to catalogue all my blurays and print out the entire cat with pictures--when visitors come over they can flick thru the titles easily.