Best way to store DVD's on Hard Drive?

Pongo

I want to store my DVD collection on my PC, running WMCE.... What's the best way of storing DVD's? Disk space isn't really a problem, I've got 500GB to play around with, but if each DVD is 4.7GB I'm really looking at compressing them I presume? Can anyone tell me the best method that will give the best playback?

Thanks in advance....

SouperComputer

It depends on the kind of quality you want really. Also it depends on if you want to keep your DVD menus and extras etc.

I used to compress but TBH, with storage being so cheap, its not worth the CPU time and loss of menus.

My Movies is basically what you want. It will rip the raw MPEG2 stream to the drive with no loss of quality and your menus will still be intact. Its dead handy to use and is all done through the MCE interface which is good for those not too techie minded in the home.

If you want to compress you can try RatDVD. Im not sure how well it works with MCE. It offers high quality compression but retains the DVD structure, IE menus etc. Its a very CPU intensive CODEC though, so its not always the best plan if the CPU in your system is already a very busy one.

If you just want to compress and store the movie on it's own, then either Xvid or X264 are excellent codecs. Divx is also popular, but I tend to use Xvid or X264

Pongo

Thanks for the info... Quality wise I don't really want to lose too much by compressing, I've got around 300 DVDs to store so I'm probably going to have to compress or else buy another hard drive...
I think I just want to store the movie on it's own, so I'll check out Xvid and X264...

SouperComputer

the other problem is that within MCE you cannot FF and "rewind" with Xvid and X264. This may change, but at the moment it doesnt work within media centre.

8T8

You will definitely want to get another hard drive if ripping all the DVDs in original form to the HD, which includes things like the menus extras etc.

I did this for a friend once, (read my guide to MCE & My DVDs) and the average file total size of each DVD was 6-7GB. If using the native DVD changer/player function of MCE you can only use DVDs in their original .vob container. Ripping to 'main movie only' did not work for me on the few titles I tried it had to be the full disc.

My Movies can use pretty much anything, if you do not wish to compress, one way to lower the file size is to try ripping to main movie only (with a DVD Decrypter) or use VOB2MPEG which will convert & merge the main movie .vobs of the DVD into a single movie.mpg file. This gives you an easy way to trim the fat from the DVD and have the movie preserved in its original form.

As for compressing to MPEG-4 the major pro is the file size reduction of course but you lose the fast forward/rewind like SouperComputer says but.. you can use the skip forward/backwards buttons in MCE to get to a particular point even if they aren't totally accurate so I never found it a major loss. (On a side note MPEG-4 actually supports menus but no-one seems to have put in the effort to create some sort of converter of DVD menus into the MPEG-4 container)

Now the other aspect is quality with XviD you will definitely notice the difference if you have an eye for that sort of thing however it has speed on it's side for encoding. With x264 [H.264] I'm hard pressed to tell the difference with high quality encodes.

Using MeGUI/x264 and the HQ-Slow profile I compress my DVDs down to 2.1GB each and I can barely tell the difference between the two. The downside is the HQ-Slow profile is very slow on my Athlon 64 X2 4400+ it takes on average 5-7 hours to encode the movie. So be prepared to do a lot of waiting with a large DVD collection but I sort of have to as my HTPC is maxed out with HD's and I don’t want to buy anymore so I'm encoding everything into H.264 & using CoreAVC to decode it in MCE.

Pongo

Thanks for the replies... Lots of food for thought there... If it's going to take 5-7 hours to compress each DVD, I'd have some serious second thoughts! Also 5-7GB to store the DVD uncompressed then I'm really looking at another 2 500GB drives, and that's just to store what I have...
Not sure if storing them on Har Drive is such a good idea now, it's nice and handy, but I definitely don't have the time to compress them, and the PC I'm running WMCE on is noisy enough without adding at least 2 more drives to it...

Back to the drawing board I think, thanks for the advice...

8T8

Yeah it's a tricky one alright, what you could do is use network storage if on an ethernet network then you can place the enclosure with the hard drives somewhere away from the HTPC and map the drives to the computer.

Then just feed the location to My Movies or My DVD's (My DVDs requires a bit of tweaking in that regard) you bypass the noise and can make use of lots of storage.

Only downside is price of course for all the hardware.

I know the encode time is a pain frankly I don't think I will be done till next year! But as it turns out Vista will be out by that time and you will get all the fancy UI transitions with the plugins for that so my main gripe against My Movies will no longer apply.

If you don't mind losing the menus/extras I still think the VOB2MPG is the best route as all those extras add up with large collections of DVDs and you should make substantial space savings.

Oh and for x264 encoding do experiment I went with HQ-Slow because I compared it against two other encodes and wasn't happy as I wanted quality. But some of the other profiles encode much faster and may offer image quality that may be fine to others its one of those things you just have to try.

Pongo

Thanks 8T8, Network Storage never even occurred to me, that's definitely a way around the noise problem...

SouperComputer

Yup, network storage is the way to go alright. Grab an old PII/PIII PC with 128/256MB of RAM, install an IDE\SATA card, your drives and a couple of fans, pop it in the attic and away you go.

OS wise, if you want to try linux, ClarkConnect home is a great place to start if you are new of *nix. Lightweight and stable, its also configurable through a web interface, dead handy if the unit is up in the attic. Failing that, you could just use windows 2000 and setup your file permissions. Install UltraVNC with the DSM encryption plugin for remote access\control of the machine.

Keep one drive in the HTPC for recorded TV, you can map it to a network share, but its hit and miss so I would avoid it. Throw all of the other media on the Server.

The other advantage to this is that you can rip multiple DVDs at the same time from different machines to the server, perhaps even ripping them on the server itself if its acessable and quick enough. This will shorten the process of getting all of the DVD's backed up.

Remember, after you rip your DVD's you can always compress later. You could even have a redundant machine compressing the content on the server if you dont want the HTPC to be overworked.

Dont forget RATdvd, compression that will keep the DVD structure.

Pongo

Some great ideas there... Thanks lads...

Alkers

I just use DVDshrink, DVD's end up all around the 4.7gb mark, some as low as 3 and some 5+.

Krusty_Clown

Sorry for joining this conversation so late, I'm just going through the same process myself and had a few questions.. Firstly, I'm happy enough with the XVid format to store my DVDs.. If I'm feeling very particular, I can go back to the DVD..

So what's the best process?
Does VOB2MPG require that the files be decrypted and stored on the HD or can it use the VOBs from the DVD on the fly?

I was thinging of converting to MPG, using the aforementioned VOB2MPG and then using VirtualDub-MPEG2 to convert to Xvid. Is this inefficient? Would I be better off using Gordian Knot or something simillar?

Ta for the tips..

8T8

With VOB2MPEG you need to use it on a decrypted DVD, this can be done with a DVD on the fly if you have something like AnyDVD running the background.

The method I used was to use DVDFabDecrypter and copy it to the HD and then run VOB2MPEG and that program strips some of the extra protections added in to discs that throw VOB2MPEG off. There are some DVDs that simply wont work with VOB2MPEG either though even if decrypted like my Back To The Future trilogy box set.


Alternatively you can use DVD Decrypter in IFO mode and select the main movie only in the settings of the program select the "IFO mode" tab and under File Splitting select "none". When you decrypt the DVD you will be left with a single VOB file that is the movie, simply rename it from .vob to .mpg

(Warning DVD Decrypter is no longer developed or supported as such disable the auto update and you will need to use something like AnyDVD to decrypt the discs with extra protections so that DVD Decrypter can process the DVD into a single .vob)

Doesn't virtual dub accept VOB ? I never really messed with that program and skipped XviD and went straight to H.264, MeGUI also encodes to XviD as well and you can queue jobs it is easy to use and I highly recommend it. I believe AutoGK supports the vob container so just use that it is a very easy program.

Here is my workflow with MeGUI*
Decrypt DVD (main movie only) with DVD Decrypter + AnyDVD
Left with single vob with .txt chapter information* (*supported in MKV container)
Load MeGUI
Run D2V creator, splits audio from video .vob
Run Asvisynth creator
Import D2V file, set video to correct aspect ratio e.g force 16:9 for anamorphic encodes
Save project
Select encoding profile for video and audio
Click Auto encode and set file size & add chapter info + subtitles if required
Jobs queued, repeat if running multiple encodes
When done press start.

That's it.

*For MeGUI to run you require
Avisynth 2.56 installed
.NET 2.0 framework installed
Everything else will be pulled down by MeGUI's own built in program downloader.


With AutoGK all you need to do is have a decrypted DVD and point it at the first vob file in the set on the disc, the software knows the rest of the vobs in the set and will read them accordingly.

Krusty_Clown

Thanks for the comprehensive reply 8T8..
What I might try is DVD Shrink in re-authoring mode, to grab and decrypt just the movie VOB, then try VirtualDub-MPEG2 to convert to XVid..

I haven't tried H.264 before. Does it produce a higher quality output?
You mentioned in a previous post that it takes a lot longer to encode than XVid. Is there any way to speed it up other than a faster processor? Probably a dumb question, but, does the graphics card have any impact on the speed of encoding?

8T8

H.264 is a superior MPEG-4 codec that has various levels (read features) within it that allow it to retain more details than XviD but H.264 is computationally more demanding at encoding & decoding as a result. It particularly excels at low bit-rates and and small file sizes.

For example I use the HQ-Slow profile this preserves a lot of detail in the movies but takes longer to encode as a result - a full rundown of the profiles are located here.

Other profiles are much faster to encode than the HQ-Slow profile and it may be you find something that you are happy with that takes a lot less longer to encode with then the HQ-Slow profile. For example you may want to try the CE-MainProfile or CE-Highprofile and see how those fair against XviD encodes.

At the moment MeGUI {which is an interface for several free programs} uses x264 which is the best H.264 encoder available. x264 is multithreaded so it benefits from dual core CPU's but there is no GPU assisted encoding though a few months ago someone was experimenting with code for such capability but I do not know what came of that.


AutoGK is an all in one DVD->XviD converter you should have no need to use any other programs bar that if converting DVDs.

MeGUI simply allows you to do more whereas AutoGK is just more user friendly have you read the AutoGK tutorial ?

If want to try MeGUI let me know as it is not that hard once you get the basics of it.

Krusty_Clown

Last year I used to use the full-blown Gordion Knot but found it too time-consuming and frustrating to use (constantly alt-tabbing between the GK interface and the user tutorial)... I tried AutoGK a few times, but the unpredicatable results (human error rather than app error!) resulted in more wasted time!

Right now, most of my movies are recorded from the Media centre, and I use the DVRMS toolkit, along with aforementioned VirtualDub.. I kind of like the virutalDub app, as its straightforward, allows you to edit out bits you dont want (commercials, lead in and out) is straightforward and has plenty of output options, so I was hoping to make use of it for converting my DVDs..

I'll give AutoGK another try.. For the moment, I'm just decrypting them to my HD, but I'm going to start running out of space pretty fast..

8T8

Well I've never really used VirtualDub so your are more of an expert in that area than I am

There is a wiki guide here that runs through converting DVD's with MeGUI {take a look at the Once Click Encoder}, if you convert the DVR-MS to MPEG-2 with DVR-MS Tools you can feed it to any program (in fact MeGUI will auto demux the audio & video when you input such a file from the Avisynth creator).

Remember MeGUI also does XviD.

You are going to run out fast with leaving DVD's untouched so far I have 30 movies using 62GB of space having converted them into H.264 with an allowance of 2.1GB per movie and I can barely tell the difference.

When I'm done I should hopefully only use around 180GB of the 400GB HD in my HTPC instead of all of it if the movies were left as is. I can live with leaving the episodic DVDs like TV shows in their original form as I only have a small few of these.

unklerosco

Pongo, by the sounds of it u'd be better off with a dvd changer... Would be alot easier.

Think its time to bite the HTPC bullet n get me a propper one....

One question, when using my movies to rip a dvd does it just do a straight copy without compression??? Also, can it take Series DVDs?? I've loads of tv shows id like to store on a HD to stream around the house.

8T8

My Movies is not a ripper, it's just a plugin for MCE thats adds a UI to display your movie collection and also display metadata. The actual program that gets the metadata is a separate program that is installed alongside My Movies, it's in its start menu program group.

You need to use a program like DVDFab Decrypter to transfer the DVD across to the computers hard drive. It will remain in it's original form so if you have a good sized collection make sure you have a lot of space free on average each disc is around 6-7GB I've found.

My Movies does support series/episodic DVD's a guide on the site covers how to do it.


{If you are familiar with the no longer developed DVD Decrypter you can use RipIt4Me to continue using that program it also has a nice feature where it forces the movie to skip all the crap at the start and jump straight to the menu.}

unklerosco

Cheers, thats exactly what i wanted to know... Have a 400gb HD that i've to RMA n will be getting another so that should hold everything... I hope..

A bit off topic, pc im gonna be using has no space for a pci tuner.. Any recomendations on a USB tuner?? Is it worth it?? At the mo im using an old vcr as a tuner(my plasma is a commercial model hence no on-bard tuner)... Was gonna get a dvd recorder but i figure a tv card in the pc will do the same..

Is it easy to use/set up TV n recording on MCE????

8T8

Before deleting all the DVD's I think had around 60 maybe 70 movies on the 400GB HD after formatting, ripping etc. of course the size will vary depending on the title.

You can get USB tuners though their is not much in the way of choice for MCE compliant external analogue tuners. This Hauppage unit is one of the few such units & it isnt cheap either but it does come with an MCE remote.

As for setting up TV listing its a doddle in MCE, all you do is run a wizard which will ask a few questions about your location test the remote changing channels and then what service you are on.

Pongo

unklerosco wrote:

Pongo, by the sounds of it u'd be better off with a dvd changer... Would be alot easier.

Think its time to bite the HTPC bullet n get me a propper one....

Would've been easier alright, but I like the idea of having everything on the HD. Almost have everything done, using RatDVD, quality wise it's almost perfect, although HD space is becoming limited... The only issue I have is that WinDVD doesn't like it, so I'm stuck with Windows Media Player.

I'd highly recommend taking the plunge and going down the HTPC road....

Urban Weigl

I rip everything to h.264. Even a 700-1000MB file (depending on the length of the movie) is virtually indistinguishable form the original. I do lose out on the menus, but to be honest all I want is the actual movie.

karltimber

I use Auto-GK and fine it the best.
I am not into menus etc so I rip a dvd to my HD using dvdshrink re-authoring mode and then let Auto-GK run over a few nights./days and encode about 20 movies at a time.

It's good that you can make a bigger movie - titanic - as a 1200mb file instead of standard 750mb.

I use to burn off new dvds for my kids when they scratched them but now - I will get the dvd player in LIDL on monday and get an external 250GB HD (euro110 in komplett) and have all their movies in one place that they can use.

you could also ask **people** if they have the movies you have on dvd and they could have them encoded to xvid/avi already.
we swap films (uncopyrightable ones of course ) at work and save time and effort.

SouperComputer

Urban Weigl wrote:

I rip everything to h.264. Even a 700-1000MB file (depending on the length of the movie) is virtually indistinguishable form the original. I do lose out on the menus, but to be honest all I want is the actual movie.

Out of interest, what software do you use to encode to H264?

Last time I looked it was command line. I didnt look too deeply mind you, but my wife isnt going to bang up an terminal window to rip a movie, and im too lazy to write any code!

8T8

SouperComputer wrote:

Out of interest, what software do you use to encode to H264?

Last time I looked it was command line. I didn't look too deeply mind you, but my wife isnt going to bang up an terminal window to rip a movie, and im too lazy to write any code!

MeGUI - frontend to x264
Staxrip - frontend to x264

Nero - uses cut down Ateme H.264 encoder still better than most other home use H.264 encoders but second to x264.

Nero has the friendliest GUI but the quality isn't as good as what x264 does, Staxrip isn't really actively developed all that much anymore I think whereas MeGUI is the most popular.

There are one or two other GUI's to x264 made primarily for Anime converting as well.

I posted my workflow with MeGUI on the previous page, the latest version of the program auto downloads (almost) everything you need no need to go on an application hunt.

Wiki guide to MeGUI

SouperComputer

cheers 8T8, mega-helpful as ever!

in your experience is there a difference in compatibility or quality between x264 and H264?

8T8

x264 is H.264

x264 is just the name given to an open source implementation of the H.264 standard, x264 is actually one of the most advanced H.264 encoders available (implementing quite a lot of the H.264 specification) & beats the pants off commercial H.264 encoders that sell for tens of thousands of dollars.

MeGUI contains a variety of profiles you can encode to, ensuring compatibility with what ever target system is going to be playing back the content. Best Windows H.264 decoder is CoreAVC followed by GPU assisted Cyberlink then FFDShow (<-free).

soSolid

unklerosco wrote:

A bit off topic, pc im gonna be using has no space for a pci tuner.. Any recomendations on a USB tuner?

I haven't used a USB tuner, although there are a few out there. One word of advice before you buy a USB tuner, check that there are/will be drivers for it in Vista, in case you want to upgrade later. Not all USB tuners will have Vista drivers...