so i have been reading the forums alot and kicking around the idea of building a media server. i have maybe 300+ dvds all retail. so if my math is right i am seeing each movie at about 7 gigs so at that rate i can fit maybe 70ish dvds on a 500 gig drive. at that right i would need a few tbs of hd space and i can't do it just yet due to $$. so i was wondering any other ideas i can do to try and fit more movies on my system. right now my spects are 1.8 c2d 2 gigs ddr 2 ram 80 gig hd (os drive) 300 gig (storage) 500 gig (storage) also a side question for those of you that have done what i am trying. what is the best format you find for keeping the movies in? iso?
If you rip the DVDs in full, then they'll take up 7-9 GB. However, if you're willing to do without alternate languages, evil unskippable previews, menus, and special features and just rip the main movie, you'll average closer to 5 GB. You can create an ISO by this method, but it's usually better to rip to DVD files (a folder full of VOBs and IFOs). That's how I've been ripping movies lately, because it takes about 15 minutes per movie, gives you the full quality of the original, and can be played nicely by Xbox Media Center or your DVD program of choice. However, if space is an issue you can fire up a program like Auto Gordian Knot and encode the movie to an AVI file using Xvid. Using this method, you can generally get movies down to about 800 MB before the quality loss becomes irritating. However, if you're more interested in quality than that, you can also set the program to encode to 100% quality (more like 95%, really) and use the original DVD soundtrack without modification. This will still result in an AVI/Xvid file, but it'll be about 2.5 GB and you'd be hard-pressed to find any quality issues even if you played it side-by-side with the original DVD. The only drawback to this method is that it's a bit time-consuming. Even on your hardware, it'll take the 15 minutes per disk of the original method, plus about and hour and a half per movie to encode to AVI.
thanks for the fast responce, i have tired a progam called clonedvd and lets me save it to about a 4gig file, for now that works fine for me. i like iso just due to the fact i can burn it fast, and when i want to watch just load it in a virutal drive and play it like a real dvd
You could just turn them into high quality Xvid .avi files if you're happy with a tiny bit of loss of quality (nothing I can see on my 32" sony trinitron). I tend to rip DVD's into 2-4GB .avi files using autoGK and just telling it to retain 100% quality. Cuts down on required space for your ripped DVD's a fair bit, I'd double check that you're happy with the quality before ripping your entire movie collection like that though. Also, I would definitely look into getting a RAID 5. If you have 300 ripped DVD's then sooner or later one of the drives that they're on is going to fail and you're going to have to re-rip 70-100 of 'em. I would never store more than 1TB of data without a RAID 5 to be honest, and it's an option I really think you should look into, although it will raise costs a bit.
I am now using 720p divx stuff as it is better quality than DVD and can compress down to about 4 - 8 gig with better quality than DVD (still not as good as HD or BluRay 24GB+ file size). I am also using Windows Home Server and have chosen not to raid it as me and my friend share our stuff so we can recover it from one another. Otherwsie I would probalby use an external USB HD and sync that on a nightly schedule. Depends how much you want to spend really.
use dvd shrink, you'll get the full dvd all the extras etc and it will about 4.3 GB and you'll be able to take out extra languages etc if you choose to before shrinking it
