Putting DVD's onto multimedia drive

GTE

Hey all,
Happy holidays.

I got this Iomega multimedia drive for Christmas and I have a shelf full of DVD's but no idea how to get them onto the drive.
I want to keep the DVD image and audio quality to a max and a free program would be cool.

Any ideas?

Thanks
bbk

marco_polo

It is not technically legal to do this despite owning the DVDs, however I find
DVD decrypter for ripping the DVD and Auto gordian knot (autogk) to encode the Divx are decent tools for the job.

Voodu Child

1) What does your multimedia drive support?

2) How many DVDs do you have, and what size is the multimedia drive?

GTE

Voodu:
1)
https://iomega-eu-en.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/iomega_eu_en.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=22152
That page doesnt copy and paste well.

2) Id say the best part of 50 dvd's between box sets and the lark. Its a 1 TB disk. 924GB's to be more exact I believe.

Thanks for that marco polo. Ill check those programs out.

Khannie

50 dvd's should fit well on a 1TB hard drive (once you convert them); It allows around 2G per DVD. I would recommend using x264 as the video codec (you get better quality for the same file size compared to xvid). A 1.5GB dvd rip with x264 encoding for video and good quality mp3 encoding for audio should look and sound very good. I haven't looked at autogk in a while, but if it doesn't support x264 there are other programs that will. 2 pass encoding will result in much better quality for the same file size, though it takes longer.

Depending on your computer, each conversion could take anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours.

Voodu Child

At 6GB a pop, you'd fit ~150 DVDs on a 1TB drive. Probably a little bit more, a lot of DVDs are only ~4GB when you strip the extras etc off.

So to be honest, I would probably just store them uncompressed for the time being. (That means just ripping the disc straight to your HDD). Your Multimedia drive supports it, and it will basically only take as long as your DVD drive allows. Maybe 5 or 10 mins per disc. I use DVDFabHDdecrypter to rip DVDs at the moment, but there are several other options already mentioned. Try them and see which suits best.

You can always decide to compress them as described by Khannie above. I definitely agree that x264 is the way to go if you care about quality. Xvid and DivX (ie MPEG-4 ASP) are fairly outdated and barely better than MPEG-2 (as on the DVD). Though if 'maxing the quality' is important, personally I would use single-pass CRF instead of 2-pass ABR - its quicker and takes a lot of the guesswork out if it.

But anyway, the first step in this process would be to rip them to a HDD, so you may as well get a start on that and see how you're fixed space wise.

GTE

Thanks for the help everyone.

As a test when I made the thread I copied the .vob file straight onto the disk and it didnt playback properly, although .vob was mentioned on the list I posted earlier.

Anyway, I have some college stuff to do now but Ill check out your suggestions soon.

Thanks all
bbk

marco_polo

bbk wrote: »

Thanks for the help everyone.

As a test when I made the thread I copied the .vob file straight onto the disk and it didnt playback properly, although .vob was mentioned on the list I posted earlier.

Anyway, I have some college stuff to do now but Ill check out your suggestions soon.

Thanks all
bbk

I think you would need to copy all the files in the VIDEO_TS Directory (in particular the .ifo file). This contains information on the locations of audio tracks, chapters etc contained in the vob file(s).

Voodu Child

Yep, MPEG-2 playback should be pretty basic for any of these Multimedia drives. Copy over the entire video_ts folder and see how it fares. Leave it named as video_ts just in case the media player looks for that kind of structure (put the whole shebang into a new folder for naming purposes if you want).

slowlydownwards

I had a terrible experince with that same media player as recently as last week.
http://boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055782908

Iomega rep was bussy, has their crap stocked exclusivelly in H Norman and DID, as I later discovered.

You will not be able to play h264 encoded content and using any other codec ATM would be foolish. In fiarness, I did not try playing raw DVD rips (VOBs).

On the upside, you can hope that Iomega will release proper firmware update to sort out all of this.

Western Digital and Asus have great players that handle h264 encoded content (even up to 1080p) with ease and are cheap. But I doubt that you'll go into bother of returning your drive.I did and in fairness they refunded me in H Norman. Ordered Asus O!Play from komplett.

btw, nevermind that big red sticker on the box that says something like "now supporting h264 - MKV up to 1080p"... it's a lie... and if you do not believe me have a browse through iomega forums.

<edit> and the fe{king thing takes ageeeeees to boot up. (excuse my french, still wexed about it)

Khannie

A straight copy from a copy protected DVD wont work. You'll need to use DVD Decryptor or something similar.

Orion

You will need something like AnyDVD to bypass the DRM then use AutoGk or Handbrake to rip the DVD.