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I picked up a program called "Magic DVD Ripper" that rips DVDs onto your hard drive in 10-15 minutes onto a disk, even a USB hard drive. It's a cheap DVD ripper, free trial, but it works a hell of a lot better than anything else I tried. It also will convert to about a dozen different formats, for ipod, Mac, straight mpg, or whatever. If you leave the base directory the same, it creates a subdirectory with the name of the disk title, so you can rip each disk with two mouse clicks.
To play the DVDs from a hard drive DVD folder (or tons of other sources), I use VLC Video Player. It's absolutely free, a project, but works better than most commercial programs. Of course, you do need a quality video card. I bought the best one that Radeon made at the time. I got a cordless mouse and put the receiver where you can take the mouse anywhere in the room and use it as a remote control. A ripped movie at full rate on the 52" TV looks as good as from the disk. I'm using S-video, but I think you can use component-level if you have the right cable.
For the sound, I'm using the default card, but it's actually a pretty good one, and does Dolby 5.1. It has a setup program that lets you draw a picture of where each speaker is, virtually, in the room. It even has one for the subwoofer.
We figured out that we have thousands of dollars' worth of videos, and rather than have them on shelves, we'll put them all on USB external drives and hide the original media in boxes. Tony can copy whatever he wants for his long trips onto his laptop while he's home, and not have to carry around a bunch of DVDs in our sleeper cab.
I've found that when I start to get depressed, coming up with a project like this keeps my spirits up, much better than reading books about operating the company, which puts me to sleep.
A movie is a little under 5 GB, so I guess you can put 100 movies on a 512 GB drive, or about 150 if you compress them a little. I've compressed a double-layer at 68% to get it down to 4.7 GB, and it still looked just about as good as it did uncompressed. Of course you can go really nuts and compress it down to VCD size if your screen isn't too big and they'll look OK. Some of the movies that I have were originally videotape, which is 320x240. If I convert any more videotapes, I'm going to lower the bit rate. Using the 6000 DVD-quality is a waste of space, going from tape.
Well, there's my video rant.
-denise
To play the DVDs from a hard drive DVD folder (or tons of other sources), I use VLC Video Player. It's absolutely free, a project, but works better than most commercial programs. Of course, you do need a quality video card. I bought the best one that Radeon made at the time. I got a cordless mouse and put the receiver where you can take the mouse anywhere in the room and use it as a remote control. A ripped movie at full rate on the 52" TV looks as good as from the disk. I'm using S-video, but I think you can use component-level if you have the right cable.
For the sound, I'm using the default card, but it's actually a pretty good one, and does Dolby 5.1. It has a setup program that lets you draw a picture of where each speaker is, virtually, in the room. It even has one for the subwoofer.
We figured out that we have thousands of dollars' worth of videos, and rather than have them on shelves, we'll put them all on USB external drives and hide the original media in boxes. Tony can copy whatever he wants for his long trips onto his laptop while he's home, and not have to carry around a bunch of DVDs in our sleeper cab.
I've found that when I start to get depressed, coming up with a project like this keeps my spirits up, much better than reading books about operating the company, which puts me to sleep.
A movie is a little under 5 GB, so I guess you can put 100 movies on a 512 GB drive, or about 150 if you compress them a little. I've compressed a double-layer at 68% to get it down to 4.7 GB, and it still looked just about as good as it did uncompressed. Of course you can go really nuts and compress it down to VCD size if your screen isn't too big and they'll look OK. Some of the movies that I have were originally videotape, which is 320x240. If I convert any more videotapes, I'm going to lower the bit rate. Using the 6000 DVD-quality is a waste of space, going from tape.
Well, there's my video rant.
-denise
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