Hi, sorry about the title, wasn't really sure how to put it. Anyways, Im looking to burn all my DVD's to an external hard drive to play on TV's around the house. Now from what ive been reseaching, i need: 1. External Hard Drive 2. Media Player for the hard drive to connect to, e.g WDTV. 3. Software for burning DVDs. 4. A tonne of DVDs to burn. Now i have around 300 films i want to store, could you reccomend an external hard drive capable of holding these, preferably USB3 (makes the whole process a bit quicker) but also compatible with a device like WDTV (please advise whether there is something better than this/easier to use). Software: I am looking for something easy to use and that doesnt cost a bomb. I just want to rattle through all the dvds in a few days and not have to worry about converting files and all that jazz. On to quality: Obviously the best that i can get really. 1080p+ would be fantastic. 720p is acceptable. Not really fussed on the price of all this, just as long as its reasonable for the products and does the job well. Thanks for any help in advance.
Just a few quick pointers. Go for a 2TB harddisk unless you are 100% certain your hardware can utilize a larger disk. DVDs cannot be ripped to 1080p. The reason is that DVD video has a maximum resolution of 720x576 pixels for PAL or 720x480 pixels for NTSC. Of course you could scale the image but the picture won't get better while the file size would obviously increase. The WDTV Live is a great player, but I haven't been following the market enough to know if something better is out there. As for the software, this is where things get a bit hairy, because DVDs are typically copyprotected, which means you need software to circumvent this. This software may be illegal in your region, even if it is only used for personal backups. Some of the better known software is AnyDVD, DVDFab, DVD Decrypter and DVDShrink.
You're also confusing the term "rip" with the term "burn". You're not burning anything, so numbers 3 & 4 on your list are not needed. You want to rip your movies to your hard drive. This involves copying (usually) the main movie to the disc, at the same time removing any copy protection on the disc. There's more info on the perfect combo here (still undecided, but plenty of choices!), but if you need some hand-holding, probably the easiest to use is DVDFab (and they've got 25% off prices if you order by the weekend, so the total price is a little over £30 - that's 10p per film)
I'm a big fan of the mymovies platform, which mounts DVDs (isos or folder structures) ripped to a hard drive, but requires a server (WHS or more serious) as the back end, and a media PC to play the movies on in each location. This might be overkill for your requirements, but plenty of info here: www.mymovies.dk Ta.
