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Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel
okay, seriously, if everybody is doing it, i'm going to have to buy a new harddrive or two as well. (rubs hands together gleefully at the thought.)
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Yes.. although I am a bit conflicted. Last two drives I bought were USB because I might go back to Windows as much as I love my Mac I really want something more powerful and expandable, but those Mac Pros are expensive.
But, the iMac has limited USB ports and using a hub just doesn't seem to work... very slow. Perhaps it is just the hub I have. So, I'm kinda wishing I went firewire (a bit more $ than USB) since you just chain them together. I guess you can get firewire ports in PCs though now a days.
Quote:
Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel
i do like the extras (when there are any, which is not always) but i could rip the extras too. i would have to look into codecs and such though since i've never done that before.
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You have two basic choices. RIP the DVD and just store it in raw uncompressed format. This gives you access to everything on the DVD just as if it was in your DVD player.
Or... rip and encode it... which has the advantage of compressing also so you can store more of them in the same space (although as we say HD are cheap these days.) I only encode the main feature and skip all the extras. Of course, you can encode the extras too.
The main difference is in how you access them. I prefer to just press play and go right into the movie.
But, encoding isn't difficult. Handbrake does it very well. You just need to do 1 or 2 and test with whatever you will play it with to be sure your video and audio (this is the part I had to fiddle with the most) to be correct.
What I do is use RipIt (mac) to put the DVD on the hard drive... then use handbrake to encode it. You can have HB rip/encode on the fly... but this way I can just rip several in one go... then batch them all up in handbrake and let it run over night. Plus for TV DVDs you need to provide the correct Season and Epi info as the file name so software like Boxee (the new beta version is awesome) or Plex that downloads meta data like actor/directory/summary/etc can look up this info online.
Of course, then the question is how to play it. I have been holding off for the Boxee Box to see what it will cost before I decided. Right now I just us PyTivo and copy from the PC to the TiVo when I want to watch anything. Much better than fishing through the many (small compared to many's collections) DVDs we have.
BOb