A friend asked me what to use and since i haven't done this in Windows in years I'm a bit behind the curve. What do you all use to copy retail dvds to blanks? Is there a decent Windows program for cataloging movies you own? I'm guessing they don't want to bother a spreadsheet and Delicious Library is OS X only. MediaMan looks promising has anyone ever used it?
DVD Decrypter DVD Shrink DVD Fab (licensed). The latter I only have to use now and then, for the stubborn studios like Sony and Disney. But even then a small percentage. Maybe 2-4% of the total I rip.
Oh I totally forgot about DVD Decrypter and Shrink! I'll point them towards DVD Fab if they have trouble with any of their dvds. Thanks!
For cataloging I use... nothing. All of my movies get ripped to hard drives, which I can access with my PC or my WD-TV. It lists all of my movies in one big list, dynamically as I add movies, so I don't have to do so manually or even load a disc! Best movie investment ever.
MakeMKV is another option. DVD's are so low quality (compared to HD) that I don't want to drop anymore quality. Hard drives are cheap. Hell, I'm using MakeMKV for Blurays now too. 10.9tb of storage goes pretty quickly with 30gig mkv's.
I've got a box running Windows Server 2003 Unified Data Storage Server. It's presenting the storage as an iSCSI lun to one of my VMs.
The friends in mind are pretty tech illiterate and looked at me like I was a martian when I suggested they rip them to a HDD.
It's too bad. Honestly, hard drive storage is the cheapest way to rip movies. About 28 cents per movie. Plus the convenience is amazing.
msp, whats your method exactly? you pop the dvd in.. then what? rip them to iso or xvid? Does the playback software you use or wdtv actually add the dvd cover or do you do that? come tax time, i desperately need to reup my hdd storage.
Can't speak for MSP, but I use makemkv to dump the main movie to an mkv file. I use XBMC as my front end - it has scraper for IMDB, themoviedb.com, etc to grab movie info, posters, etc.
double thanks. added to my dvd powertools. installing xbmc now, and xbmc remote on my phone. tired of getting up to goto my computer!
My method is uber simple - I rip an uncompressed ISO. 15 minutes, that's it. Both VLC on my PC and the WD-TV in my movie room will read ISO files, and so I get all of the normal DVD menu structures. Bonus features, audio settings, etc. So much faster than ripping and encoding. Sure, uncompressed ISOs take up more room, but at 28 cents a movie it's just not work my time. And best of all, if I want to actually put one of them on a blank DVD I just double click the ISO file and insert a blank. :thumbsup:
DVD Decrypter, Shrink, and Fab all have options to rip the movies as straight up ISOs. Haven't checked out Isobuster, thanks for the tip.
i rip movies and store them in a folder structure on my hard drives. movies are sorted by title, a folder for each letter (A,B,C etc...) movies are formatted as "Title (year).avi" TV shows are sorted by series name, then season, filenames sorted by "S00E00 - Episode Title" i have (4) 1.5 TB drives, 70% full. I love my setup, it took a lot to format everything to keep it organized, but it was worth it. I use dvdshrink and autogk
I just rip to drive. Then I have my pooter hooked to my receiver. I use Windows media center for accessing them. Same with any mkvs I get from torrents. Works great.
