Good Disk Library Solutions? 371
First time submitter fikx writes "How do Slashdotters manage large collections of disks? I'm hoping for a way to manage a large collection of movies that would give me menu type access to the content, and the only consumer device left seems to be the Sony disk changer, which is discontinued. I would have thought that handling disks would have been a solved problem and on sale in many forms, but I guess not. Have Slashdotters found or built solutions? Or has this problem gone the way of the typewriter?"
I think the generally accepted solution (Score:5, Informative)
let's see DRM, high cost of HDD's get in the way o (Score:2)
of doing that and if say you have blu rays that like 25-50GB per disk.
Re:let's see DRM, high cost of HDD's get in the wa (Score:5, Informative)
Handbrake takes care of DRM for DVDs. For Blu-Ray use MakeMKV to extract the disc from DRM, then Handbrake to bring the file size down to 5 to 10 GB depending on the quality you want.
I'm amazed anyone DOESN'T rip their discs. Who wants to be forced to wade through stupid menus and messages that you can't skip?
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Is there a good option (for mac preferably) that will rip a DVD after looking it up in some database (like CDDB) to get the names and indexing information correct. Ripping is easy enough, but I'm tired of choosing all the chapters for each episode when ripping season 3 of whatever. The last time I let RipIt have a go at a DVD I ended up with Battlestar Galactica disc 2 starting half way through the third episode.
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Huh? ripit, in its basic mode of operation, creates a decrypted, clean copy of a dvd, without any bogus sectors etc. That's it. Why would it do what you claim is beyond me, perhaps it's a bug. I haven't used ripit's compress feature, so perhaps you're referring to that?
Re:let's see DRM, high cost of HDD's get in the wa (Score:5, Informative)
He's asking for more than just a decrypted copy of a DVD.
He wants the same thing that is commonplace and expected for a music CD: something that detects all the tracks and matches them up to content titles. Clearly he wants something that can sort out a pile of Buffy DVDs, correctly label season, episode and title names and possibly fetch extra metadata.
A simple ripper doesn't do that.
Besides Kaledescape, I am not aware of anything that does.
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Apple's prohibited programs fulfilling some of those requirements from being sold in the AppStore. Off the AppStore, however, there are some solutions. You might look into iVI, though it seems targeted at the anime audience. http://www.southpolesoftware.com/iVI/iVI.php [southpolesoftware.com]
Re:let's see DRM, high cost of HDD's get in the wa (Score:4, Informative)
Give it to XBMC, then point it to thetvdb.com and imdb.com. Name the files correctly, "Farscape 1x2" for example, and let the magic of the media center software do the rest.
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"Hey guys, is there anyway to automate boring task?"
"Sure! Just manually perform boring task first and this program will perform irrelevant task for you automatically!"
Thanks. Really.
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Is there a good option (for mac preferably) that will rip a DVD after looking it up in some database (like CDDB) to get the names and indexing information correct. Ripping is easy enough, but I'm tired of choosing all the chapters for each episode when ripping season 3 of whatever. The last time I let RipIt have a go at a DVD I ended up with Battlestar Galactica disc 2 starting half way through the third episode.
For the Mac, I use MetaX can write tags to ripped movie files, which gets data from tagchimp.com. But it's user-contributed data, so duplicates, errors and typos can creep in.
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There is no such service (as CDDB) to get DVD chapters. DVD "chapters" don't really exist outside the menu-software of the DVD (a random software or hardware DVD player will never enumerate chapter names), Handbrake can handle CSV's if you really want to name them.
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The two are unrelated, actually. There a players which offer unconditional skipping and which use the disc directly.
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Except that the discussion was clearly about DVD playing software. Otherwise the qualifier "which use the disc directly" would be unnecessary. Plus, it's in the context of access to the contents of the DVD from computer software. (That is, after all, what TFQ and essentially every substantive comment is about.)
VLC isn't actually limited by the operating system's region restrictions. It will ignore DVD regions as well on Windows as it does on Linux. It can, however, be limited by the DVD reader firmware.
Re:let's see DRM, high cost of HDD's get in the wa (Score:5, Insightful)
"Handbrake takes care of DRM for DVDs."
For *some* DVDs. It doesn't handle all of them because the producers of the DVDs keep updating their bogus DRM techniques and thus it is a constant arms race. And it is genuinely bogus, because that's what most of these techniques do: insert bogus sectors and other trickery that trips up a simple ripping program but not most DVD players (and the ones that don't work are collateral damage). Why the media producers bother to keep throwing money at a problem that people will just find a way around in order to use the product they have already bought is beyond my understanding. Do they really think they're stopping anything by spending all that money on DRM? And, no thank you, I don't want to disclose all sorts of unnecessary personal information in order to activate a digital copy that isn't ripped the way I want it anyway.
These days it's easier for a pirate to set up a movie library than a legitimate purchaser, and that situation *sucks*.
Re:let's see DRM, high cost of HDD's get in the wa (Score:5, Informative)
Anything that Handbrake can't handle, AnyDVD will.
There are really very few DVDs that you will need to use AnyDVD for. There have been a few failed attempts at extra copy protection on DVDs. However, for the most part it's mainly Disney disks that will give you trouble.
The vast majority of DVDs won't give you trouble.
However, since you're going to need AnyDVD for BluRays anyways you've got that as a backup option.
+...yeah. It's easier to pirate than use modern video media to it's full potential.
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That only applies to copy protection and CSS isn't copy protection. Moreover it only applies to effective copy protection and CSS definitely isn't effective at controlling copies by any definition one might want to apply.
Re:let's see DRM, high cost of HDD's get in the wa (Score:5, Informative)
That only applies to copy protection and CSS isn't copy protection.Moreover it only applies to effective copy protection
It most certainly is copy protection. And why would you think the DMCA only applies to "effective" protection? I know of no such distinction in the law. You'd be surprised how many times the DMCA has been invoked during lawsuits: printer cartridges, garage-door remotes ... even data streams that were not by any stretch of the imagination "encrypted" have still fallen under the DMCA.
Regardless, you could take your data, XOR each byte with 0xFF, call it copy protection, and anyone that tries to recover your data by flipping the bits back is in violation of the relevant DMCA provisions. Period.
and CSS definitely isn't effective at controlling copies by any definition one might want to apply.
Sure it is. It's extremely effective. The reality is the bulk of people who buy DVDs will never bother to make a copy, and for those that do, CSS stops them in their tracks. Sure, it's not effective at controlling decrypted copies disseminated via the Internet, but that was never the purpose of CSS. It's intent was to raise the bar sufficiently that only the most knowledgeable individuals would be able to make physical copies, to make it too inconvenient for Joe Average. And you know what? That's still true today.
Re:let's see DRM, high cost of HDD's get in the wa (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm glad more 18th century Bostonians didn't think like you.
Re:let's see DRM, high cost of HDD's get in the wa (Score:5, Funny)
Citation needed.
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Anecdotal, but my brother does.
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Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?
Women.
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That law isn't kicking in until you give those files (or discs) to someone else.
However, I don't blame you for not wanting to be seen downloading the tools to do it.
Re:let's see DRM, high cost of HDD's get in the wa (Score:5, Informative)
That law isn't kicking in until you give those files (or discs) to someone else.
However, I don't blame you for not wanting to be seen downloading the tools to do it.
You have the legal right to make copies for personal use, but the media companies got around that by making the requisite software illegal. Your basic Catch 22.
Re:let's see DRM, high cost of HDD's get in the wa (Score:5, Interesting)
Because as much as I hate and disagree with it, breaking DRM is illegal in the US under the DMCA, and there are still some of us who grudgingly but respectfully honor the rule of law.
This is a classic example of stage 4 morality on Kohlberg's scale [wikipedia.org]. Both stage 3 [social conformity] and stage 4 [obedience to authority] appear to be common in modern societies. Luckily, your Constitution was written by people operating (perhaps temporarily, and just for that purpose) at stage 5 [social contract], and who recognized that laws which are counter to the general welfare should be changed.
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Too bad the people in positions of power are infested with stage 3 and 4 (most damagingly, stage 4). If there was suddenly a law passed making it illegal to consume yellow apples, a large portion of the population would roll over and throw out their yellow apples.
Re:let's see DRM, high cost of HDD's get in the wa (Score:5, Insightful)
Kohlberg's scale has it's uses as an academic model but it's far too naive to apply in the real world.
Take the Heinz dilemma [wikipedia.org] from the wiki. It is implied that stage six (universal human ethics) should be the only consideration despite there being 6 valid points made. Saving a life seems a clear win only in such a sharply defined, stark and simple example.
Conformity is implied to be little more than obedience to perceived expectations, while respecting law-and-order is obedience to a rule book. Obedient people who cannot or will not make a true ethical decision. Putting aside this ignorance for the true value of society and law, both of these are things which have evolved between a lot of people and a lot of time to be protector of rights and a shortcut for morality.
People can seek "universal human ethics", accept that it is impractical for them to make a fair judgement and default back to social expectations/law. People can accept they are ignorant of the full facts and implications, or that their stance on rights and ethics in the situation is too heavily influenced by their personal bias.
A justification based on rights or ethics does not make it a valid or true justification. Usually when politicians and people of power start gesturing excitedly and talking of rights and fundamental values I get concerned about what shit they're trying to pull now. These are the justifications and rationalisations given for decisions that were really made in self interest.
People can also accept that the ethics/rights issues at stake are truly pedantic and accept the law issues as more important. On more important issues, people can take a stand for rights and ethics yet still observe a law that runs to the contrary. Where is the category which said Heinz found a flaw in law and society therefore should seek to address it?
I notice comments promoting the constitution have been heavily upvoted, while the post supporting the rule of law is actually downvoted as flamebait. Anyone else pondering the irony, and just how conformist Slashdot is?
Re:let's see DRM, high cost of HDD's get in the wa (Score:5, Insightful)
What I do see every day are people who see the law as shades of gray, and see anything darker than the shade they chose to draw their line as being criminal, and anything lighter not counting. This includes me. I consider raping, murdering, and eating your neighbors to be criminal. I don't consider copying the DVD you purchased to a hard drive that you purchased so that you can watch a movie on the TV you purchased without jumping through hoops to be criminal.
Re:let's see DRM, high cost of HDD's get in the wa (Score:5, Funny)
I consider raping, murdering, and eating your neighbors to be criminal.
So as long as I don't eat them, it's cool? Cool.
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Anything that's fun is illegal in some way so you have to be a complete sourpuss to obey every single law in existence. I doubt if it's even physically possible.
It's worse than that, really. An innocent man is hard to control: make him a criminal, especially if he isn't even aware that he is, and you have him by the short and curly any time you want him.
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Unjust laws with no repercussions don't bother me. Or rather, they bother me and so I don't obey them.
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"Rule of law" usually implies that laws were written by some other criteria than "he who has the gold makes the rules" (since otherwise they just become rule by the strongest, or dictatorship). Since copyright laws were written based on what Disney wanted with no regards to anything else, obeying or not obeying them has nothin
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RAID can be done in software. So it doesn't have to be inherently expensive. You aren't trying to be Pixar. You're just (maybe) trying to make multiple disks look like one disk.
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Also, software raid is plenty fast, and typically more robust than consumer-grade "hardware" solutions.
Very happy with MD raid-5.
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of doing that and if say you have blu rays that like 25-50GB per disk.
That's a really good point. BD movies would fill a tb drive in 20-40 movies. That's bad, but not crippling. I doubt a carrousel BD changer for 20-40 disks would be much cheaper (and you can always expand a FS).
I still think backing physical content up on HDs and then long-term storing the physical copies wins.
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At 50GB/disk, you can still get 40 movies on a single 2TB drive. Even with the hard disk shortage, this is an affordable solution. In reality, you can delete all the extras when you rip and get far more movies on the drive, or you can even re-encode. Though I use FreeBSD with ZFS to add disks in pairs for redundancy, a Windows Media box can also work well, as it has a way to add capacity... a co-worker of mine goes this route, though I think ZFS has him intrigued.
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Yeah, I upgraded my FreeBSD 8.1 box to 9.0-RC2 so I could start playing with ZFS v28. Madly sacrificing chickens in triplicate, after a Gentoo-like recompile of 400 ports, freebsd-upgrade left me a somewhat hosed system where basic services (startx, portupgrade) won't run complaining that libz.so.5 is missing. I guess I'm looking at a fresh install.
As far as I got with ZFS, it totally rocked. In my test I set up a three drive mirror (which I think of as a plain mirror with a presilvered hot spare). Seei
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Cool. I'm still on FreeBSD 8, just because I'm redoing rooms in the house and don't have time to experiment :)
Like most home users crazy enough to run their own basement server, I use it for several jobs. It's a time machine target, it's a music server, it's a pictures repository, it's a CrashPlan target (thanks to Linux emulation), it's a web server, and probably things I'm forgetting. For me, the main appeal of ZFS is the data integrity. A few years ago, my backup scheme involved Unison, and it caught a b
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BluRay jukeboxes aren't exactly cheap either. Plus the software isn't very widespread. DVD jukeboxes had the exact same problems which is why it became more common to see people rip everything.
Furthermore, the DRM of your disks is still going to limit you with a physical jukebox solution. It's still there and getting in the way.
The only way around that really is to just get rid of the DRM to begin with.
People have put together hard drive based solutions specifically because they don't like DRM limitations a
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Niether Blu Ray or DVD are compressed for storage, they are compressed to fill their respective discs. Please keep this in mind for all future conversations involving home media theaters and internet streaming.
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... is to rip everything to a large hard disk and set up some sort of media center.
Absolutely. Rip it to your format of choice, and put the discs in a box in the garage... in case you have a HD failure and need to re-rip them or want to re-rip them in a different format later. Alternatively, sell/give away/throw out the discs after ripping and when you need another copy buy/download another copy.
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Bit reducing the video, and capturing core audio (DD out of TrueHD, for example) works just fine for most movies. On most displays you won't notice the difference at a constant quality of RF21 or 22 (using HandBrake in an .h264 encoded MKV as an example). I can tolerate a few GB in storage compared to the whole deal. When I want the full experience, then I'll break out the actual disc, but my kids don't care if some of Tinkerbell's finest detail is slightly obscured through compression, when the trade-off i
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plus, you HELP sony each time you buy that stuff via license fees. I DO NOT WANT TO EVER HELP SONY. EVER.
Blu-Ray is a jointly developed consortium format, not Sony only Perhaps you are assuming that Sony's strong support of Blu-Ray and using it in the PS3 meant it was Sony owned.
Sony is also a member of the DVD Forum and jointly developed the CD format...do you refuse to buy DVD's and CD's as well? Apparently not, from your mention of DVD rips, that makes you a hypocrite doesn't it.
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Disc = British English spelling.
Disk = American spelling.
Applies to hard drives, CD's, DVDs and every other circular thing.
The way it is spelt should not imply anything about the nature of the thing itself, only the origin of the person writing about it.
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What's the difference between a "disc" and a "disk?" [apple.com]
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First four hits on Google:
What's the difference [apple.com]
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Disc = British English spelling. Disk = American spelling. Applies to hard drives, CD's, DVDs and every other circular thing.
The way it is spelt should not imply anything about the nature of the thing itself, only the origin of the person writing about it.
That is not the way those spellings work. "Disc" was coined in association with Compact Discs (CDs) when Siemens and Sony developed the original technology. The CD trademark actually specifies that "Compact Disc" be spelled that way. Since neither Siemens, nor Sony are English companies, nor reside in English speaking countries or former colonies, you are dead wrong on that assertion.
In my experience, "disk" is traditionally associated with magnetic recording technology, e.g. hard disk, floppy disk, zip
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Applies to hard drives, CD's, DVDs and every other circular thing.
Okay, now go and look at every piece of storage media you've ever owned. In the data storage domain, disc and disk are clearly defined, mostly for branding/licensing purposes. IBM named Hard/Soft Disks (and thereafter all magnetic disks), and Phillips/Sony named Compact Discs (and thereafter all optical discs).
Yes, typewriter (Score:4, Informative)
Rip discs. Use media center application.
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Same here. Just wish my system could do it faster. The sooner I get rid of my physical DVDs, the better.
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Don't use RAID, just run a backup onto another large HDD every month or so. Then you'll only have to rip another few discs if you have problems.
Personally, I haven't ripped any DVDs or blu-rays, and I'm hoping to just step over the issue by using services like LoveFilm, Netflix, etc.
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Precisely. Even at today's prices, it's still pretty affordable to set up a fault-tolerant array with several tb of storage. Most 1080 movies compress to 8-10 gigs without much loss of quality. That's 100 HD movies per tb of storage, give or take.
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Many movies don't do justice to the extra data used to encode a BD version. A lot of content isn't available in high definition to begin with..
Regardless of how you manage your disks you might want to peruse a review or two before you shell out extra money for a new version of something that you likely already have or can get dirt cheap.
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No, he doesn't. He just has to keep the receipts for the purchases.
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No, he does, receipts only demonstrate that you've paid for the discs, they don't demonstrate that you still own them. For instance receipts could still be retained if one sold the discs or gave them away.
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Put them in a box.
Alternately, dispose of original packaging and just keep the inserts and covers. The physical disks themselves can compress down quite nicely.
Boxed sets also compress nicely. They make special "banker boxes" you can use for this. Get some nice deep shelves and just shove them in a corner.
Jukebox (Score:2)
Googling for cd rom jukebox first hit in shopping is a 100 disc cd/dvd jukebox with usb and dasychainable for ~150 bucks each. other than that ISO's and a fat NAS
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That represents 900G of storage space tops.
Plus you need the software that can manage that device.
Kaleidescape (Score:5, Informative)
How big is your budget?
http://www.kaleidescape.com/ [kaleidescape.com]
http://www.kaleidescape.com/products/ [kaleidescape.com]
Beautiful stuff. Flawless operation. Drains your bank account.
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Beautiful stuff. Flawless operation. Drains your bank account.
They gotta make their money now before the business model evaporates in 10 years.
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About the only problem I have is that they sell exclusively via distributors. I really dislike hardware that I can't simply order online... I mean, you can get a $50k custom-built server spec'd and ordered online, their stuff isn't any different so why can't one buy it directly?!
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Looks great, but what does it actually cost? I assume it follows the old adage "if you have to ask, it's too much". Seems that you can only get it via stupidly priced "Solution Designer" type folks.
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It costs more than any other available option.
It's highly proprietary. You can't just use any playback client. You must use THEIR playback client. The same goes for jukeboxes and disk packs for their RAID arrays.
What you rip isn't portable. It can't be taken "out of the system".
You can't load your rips onto your phone or tablet.
A hash of stacks of Least Recently Used disks ... (Score:5, Funny)
... sitting on the living room floor. The system is managed by an ugly bag of mostly water.
Surprising efficient and effective.
Low tech for high brows.
XMBC + HP Desktop with Media Center remote (Score:5, Informative)
In March of 2011 I bought an HP desktop that has a media center remote. (It also has a TV tuner, BluRay, and HDMI.)
I installed XMBC, which supports the remote. It provides a great menu to navigate EVERYTHING, isos, avis, mkvs, mp3s, aacs, flacs, and some of those other whacky DVD rip formats.
The only problem is that my hard drive with about 500 gigs of DVD rips crashed! Just make sure to back up everything on a regular basis!
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The only problem is that my hard drive with about 500 gigs of DVD rips crashed! Just make sure to back up everything on a regular basis!
It's easier to re-rip/download than it is to backup media (movies/music).
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> It's easier to re-rip/download than it is to backup media (movies/music).
No. It is much more of a bother to rip stuff again.
Backing up your media can be as simply as "cp DiskA/* DiskB".
Messing around with any number of optical disks is going to be more bother than that.
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depends. If you're just ripping DVDs and playing the VOB's in some media center that can stream them, then yeah, it's not toooo big a problem. If, however you rip, then re-encode, that's a big pain. I can re-encode most DVDs to MKV in handbrake and get a file size of around 1.5 to 2GB w/ 5.1 and the resulting file is pretty much indistinguishable from the DVD on my 65" DLP. On smaller screens it looks even better. Unfortunately, it runs 45-60 m
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It's easier to re-rip/download than it is to backup media (movies/music).
No. Handling hundreds of discs or torrents to recreate a collection is a lot more job than hooking up another 2-3TB disk and keeping two copies. That is, if you're insisting on keeping a collection, I know more and more that don't at least for movies. They download, watch and delete and if they want to see it again, they'll download it again. Music is different, there you can play it many many times in playlists but movies you see a handful times tops, most actually just once or twice.
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I already have a file server, I wanted my media center to be small and silent. So I bought an Apple TV gen2, jailbroke it and dropped XBMC on it.
It's low power, damn near instant on and completely silent. The single only down side is that it'll only play H.264 HD since that's all that's HW accelerated, but I can live with that
Disks types (Score:2)
It wasn't until the middle of second line that I noticed that the poster was suggesting optical disks.
People actually use optical storage for anything but backups?
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People use optical storage for backups?
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They aren't useful for backup either. Hard disks are cheaper and easier to handle, and often last longer.
The only reasonable use for DVDs is for when you need to send a couple of GB to someone with a slow or capped internet connection.
Dacal changers for 150 disks,supported under Linux (Score:5, Informative)
Robot arm optional by DIY
KISS (Score:4, Insightful)
Just put all your movies on a shelf in alphabetical order. If you have LOTS of them, then use a more orderly system [ehow.com]. For the 5 seconds it takes to manually swap out a disc to watch a one or two hour movie, anything else is massive overkill.
Shelves? You want shelves? (Score:2)
http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f104/tsudhonimh/bookcases/bookcase_4unit.jpg [photobucket.com]
Digital Media Library (Score:5, Informative)
I wanted a home theater PC with instant-access to all of my films. My solution was as follows:
(a) Rip all discs to hard drive,
(b) Index and link to files with software solution
In detail:
(a) I chose to go with MakeMKV for most of my ripping. It rips the mpeg2/4 video directly to an mkv file, without reencoding, and you can choose all the tracks you want to go with it. (I.e., some titles I rip multiple audio streams and subtitles, some I take just English 2.0). For me, I just ripped the main title from each film; if I want to see the special features later, I'll take the box down off the shelf and pop the disk in. (Special features don't really matter to me that much.) Each rip averages 3 to 6Gb. Now MKV, while a great file format, isn't compatible with some (especially older) consumer electronics. You can always re-encode, if you really need to make a particular title portable. And for my Blu Ray / HD-DVD titles, I re-encoded anyway. I found a 1080P 6Gb-target-size h.264 two-pass re-encode to be indistinguishable on my 52" TV from the original. In fact, it's probably quite a bit of overkill.
For storage, I have a couple of 3Tb drives in an external enclosure, with a duplicate unit for backup. (Got them for a song before the manic price gouging going on now started!.) So far, it's holding over 500 titles and several TV series, and plenty of room to grow. And I can always increase capacity.
(b) For keeping track of everything, I eventually went with Collectorz.com Movie Collector. I've tried many solutions, both free and payware, and Movie Collector was the one that fit my needs the best. (There is a lot of good software out there -- look around!) As I ripped my collection in my spare time, I simply scanned in the UPC on the back of each film using an old CueCat barcode scanner. The software then populates all of the data for the film. Once the film was ripped, I simply linked the title in Movie Collector to the video file on the hard drives. Now I can visually browse my entire collection and watch any title at the click of a mouse. And it's nice to be able to go, "Hey, how many Humphrey Bogart movies do I own?" and find out with a simple filter.
What worked for me might or might not fit your needs, but hopefully it gives you ideas.
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Why not keep them in MPEG2/4 containers if you're keeping them MPEG2/4 codec, that way commercially available consumer electronics media devices can play them as well.
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That's worthless if you want 5.1 AC3 audio - that doesn't fit in an MPEG2 container in any way that consumer electronic devices like. If you have a home theater receiver, that matters.
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1080P 6Gb-target-size h.264 two-pass re-encode
For future reference, the only thing multi-pass encoding gets your is accurate quantizer scaling to precisely hit a target filesize. If you don't have any filesize constraints (because you're storing this crap on a disk several hundred times larger than the file), just set a static quantizer or quality target and forget about it. The codec is much better at deciding just how much data is needed than you are.
Rip, store, and XBMC it (Score:4, Informative)
Discgear storage units (Score:5, Informative)
And you can use the included software to maintain your library index, and print index labels for the containers.
Homebuilt DVD carousel (Score:2)
but I'm retiring it out (at my own pace) for a stack of hard disks which have far higher data density.
some more detail after reading posts (Score:2)
Disks? (Score:2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKYQ5ibxslI [youtube.com]
Ripping Software (Score:3)
Be realistic. (Score:5, Funny)
Store those movies in these file folders with plastic pockets. Buy the kind that will let you also store the jewel case printed material.
Figure out how many hours a week you are planning to watch movies from your collection. Figure out how many years it is going to take to finish what you already have. Finally realize the only reason you have such a big collection is to brag about the size of the collection. So save some money on the techno solutions and buy more movies to enhance the bragging.
Sounds like a Lego Mindstorms project... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like a Lego Mindstorms project... Start building!
How many discs? (Score:3)
You didn't specify how large your collection is. If it's just a few hundred discs, then I personally agree with whoever it was way up there that just recommended one of those big honking disc binders. One or two 320-disc binders, while weightier than you might imagine, are nice and easy to keep in alphabetical order, if you've got a fairly static collection.
Once the numbers get much above that, though, yeah, I'm not sure, either. Six of those binders can break through a cheap ikea-type shelf (true story), and anyone who pipes up "rip them" can go suck on a tesla coil... I'm still trying to find a solution myself, maybe something like a DIY Redbox Kiosk, though I don't know how much those actually hold...
Stop consumerism. Why have a "collection"? (Score:4, Interesting)
How many DVDs can you watch?
7 a week? Really? Haven't you got a life?
I suggest a normal person with varied interests and in employment won't watch more than 2 DVD's per week on average (and with TV, movies, music, gaming, Internet and other exotic activities like going to concerts, doing sports, or reading a book requiring our time, I reckon the number may be smaller. Have you got kids? You watch more than 2 DVDs a week, but I guess you are tired by now of watching Toy Story yet again).
So lets say you will watch 100 DVDs this year. All of them only once. And most of them, perhaps all, will never be seen again ever, because you have other 100 to watch next year.
At this time of the year if you have a DVD "collection" what I suggest you should be doing is to get rid of half of it in order to make space for next year 100 DVDs.
The situation does not change much if these DVDs are in your computer (or server farm, whatever).. YOu won't watch most of it ever anymore.
So my solution is keep a collection of 100 and be scrupulous about this: a new disk gets in one gets out. It is that simple. Eventually you build a real collection of movies that you may watch sometime again. Keep the collection in a shelf, alphabetically, and forget the bloody computer and ripping: you have better things to do with your life (I hope).
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I agree if it's just a matter of laziness, but DVDs in their boxes take a whole lot of space. My books already take a whole wall, if I stored music CDs and DVDs on their boxes I'd have to move out.
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1) Removed all the physical discs from their cases, removed the insert and saved it in a box in case we ever want it later (I doubt we will but all the inserts take up only one small box.) Throw away all the jewel cases.
2) Get a bunch of empty DVD and CD cake boxes (2 garbage bags full free from Craigslist.) Have a separate cake box for each letter of the alphabet (some common
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The disks rip themselves. It's not like you've got to sit there and ferry the bits across the SATA cable. All you have to do is wait for it to finish. If you have multiple disks, just check your PC every once and awhile.
The same goes for transcoding. You start it. It handles itself until it is finished. You are not scribbling numbers by hand on paper or other similar nonsense.
It takes 5 minutes to type in the titles for an entire season of something so names can be properly sorted out. That is the extent of
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I follow this for all except kids movies/shows. They actually do watch them over and over and there are tons of shows.
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I have it straight from the horse's mouth: **AA would rather you went to HMV and BOUGHT (read: LICENSED) another copy. They DO NOT LIKE people to be able to back up their own duplicates. That's in violation of their ideal license restrictions and hurtful for their bottom line. This is why we have Macrovision et. al.; why Macrovision go mental at people who sell region-free players exclusively, and why **AA spend SO DAMN MUCH money that isn't theirs, on advertising trying to convince people that copying medi