Backing up hundreds of DVDs... Need advice.

[foog]

Over the years I have bought around 900 DVDs that range from Television Series, Movies, Cartoons, Workout Programs, etc. Some of them are getting scratched to the point of being unreadable by family members' abuse. I would like to find a way to preserve them so that if they do get to the point of being unreadable then I could just burn another.

That and I hate having to go through all of my DVDs to find a movie I want to see. I'd much rather have all of them stored on my PC digitally so that I could use a search function to find a movie I want to watch.

I need advice from some of you gurus on the following:
1. Considering the amount of DVDs I have, how much HDD space do I need?
2. What is the most efficient encoder I could use to convert these DVDs?
3. What is the most popular encoder I could use?
4. How long do you think this process would take?

I have 2 external HDDs (160 GB and a 400 GB) and I am thinking that that should be enough space, I could be wrong. The video quality is not a HUGE issue, but I do want them to still look decent. The extras, subtitles, dvd-rom features, etc. are not important to me at all.

I just want to be able to put all my DVDs in 200 DVD cases and place them in my closet, have all of them backed up onto my computer some how, and be able to watch them from any room in my house (I already have the later set up with modded Xbox's).

I'd appreciate any advice from you guys,
thanks

jojones88

[Awatef]

Space needed: 615+ GB!
Time needed: depends on your PC, realtime at least
Most effective codec: AVC! but slow encoding! x264 can be used

[ilovejedd]

1) Depending on how picky you are, your 520GB (assumed 160GB+400GB=560 billion bytes) of storage may or may not be enough. I'm betting on the not. Even if you somehow manage to fit your whole collection, they probably won't be watchable in TVs other than small to mid-sized CRTs. Think VCD quality or so. In any case, storage is fairly cheap nowadays. A recent Western Digital My Book Essential 500GB purchase cost me just $150 compared to a Maxtor OneTouch 160GB for $160 a couple of years back.

2) IMHO, MPEG-4 AVC is the most efficient codec quality/size-wise. Not so efficient 'encoding time'-wise compared to XviD or DivX. Your only problem is the Xbox is somewhat lacking in processing power. You might want to check out the supported video formats and resolutions on the XBMC wiki (http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/index.php?title=2.0.0_Point_Release#Supported_video_formats_and_resolutions) to get an idea what codec would better fit your purpose and TV.

3) Commandline, there's x264 for MPEG-4 AVC, xvid_encraw for XviD (MPEG-4 ASP). There's also ffmpeg for both x264 and XviD and a whole lot of other codecs. If you don't want to mess with command line, there's a bunch of GUIs out there.

4) What Awatef said. Unless you have Quad Core CPUs like the guys on this thread (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=122318) have. Although, the encoding time you save would probably be eaten up by all the preparation and drudge work. Put DVD in drive, rip in IFO mode, remove DVD from drive, repeat...

[foog]

The rig I'll be using to rip all of these movies was going to be,
2.0 GHz Athlon XP, 512Mb Ram, 233 FSB, 16x NEC DVD-RW Drive... blah blah

A fossil in other words, but I will be getting a 2ghz Dual-Core Macbook here soon so I guess that will cut down on the encoding time.

I'll do a few tests on whether or not my Xbox's will be able to handle the decoding.

Thanks a lot guys!

[ilovejedd]

If space isn't an issue (in short, if you're buying extra HDDs) and you'll be using XviD, you might want to use single-pass constant quantizer to cut down on encoding time. I'm not sure if the same thing can be done for x264 as I don't know if the Xbox will be able to handle it if the bitrate gets too high.

Oh, and that's not a fossil. I still have a perfectly working albeit extremely slow Pentium III 733MHz, 64MB PC133 SDRAM, Win98SE PC.

[prOnorama]

I'd go for XviD, a lot of DVD's you can reduce to 700 Mb with reasonable quality and very decent encoding speed (or use a custom filesize). If you use the right settings a lot of (cheap) DVD players are able to play back XviD/DivX content as opposed to x264. With an Athlon 2 Ghz a DVD to XviD rip will take around 4-5 hours average.

[int 21h]

If space isn't an issue, why bother transcoding at all? If nothing else, surely the time savings of simply ripping ISOs would justify the additional expense of storage...

[FredThompson]

Yeah, rip to ISO and mount/serve via TVersity.

900 DVDs could be 6.3TB, though...

[int 21h]

Even if you assume you are going to only spend 30 minutes on each DVD doing various things (ripping, burning, etc.) that actually require your attention, that is still $11,000+ in time (at $50k a year). In reality, I wouldn't be surprised if each one took longer than that.

12 * 500GB hard drives is $1600...

[techreactor]

I would have used the following methodologies.

Method A - Less time consuming more HDD's required.

- Sort the DVD's as most scratched (more chances of loosing it), medium scratched, light scratches and Clean.

- Now pick up the most scratched ones and rip them in ISO mode to the HDD (dedicate this HDD to the rips) and then as your time permits move to next category and then the next, till you finish the clean ones.

- Keep storing on multiple HDD, one each for each category. For the most/medium scratched ones, I would even suggest buy another HDD and build a mirror, RAID1 for redundancy.

Method B - More time but less space required

- Sort the DVD's as most scratched (more chances of loosing it), medium scratched, light scratches and Clean.

- Now pick up the most scratched ones and rip them in FILE mode to the HDD. You can save space if you rip only the Movie or Movie+Menu's, depends on your taste.

- Rip two movies at a time and use DVD Remake pro(if "movie only" is ripped) with DVD rebuilder to combine and squeeze them to 4.7 GB for the combined space, otherwise use only DVD rebuilder to compress one move to a 4.7 GB, Quality will be retained this way.

-As your time/HDD permits move to next category and then the next, till you finish the clean ones. DVD rebuilder can be used in batch mode for multiple conversions depending on the HDD space availability.

[foog]

Well, space is somewhat of an issue. I really would like to keep my collection from being split up into multiple harddrives, but I know that is not going to happen. I plan on buying more HDD space when ever I reach my maximum.

I am thinking about using DivX rather than AVC-MP4. I did rip a few Kung Fu movies with Handbrake last night, they averaged about 3.5 hours each for encoding, they look great. They play well on my Xbox. The bit rate was set at 720kbs~, audio aac 64kbs. These movies are older ones so perfect quality did not matter, but these MP4 rips turned out to be around 500 megs and still look decent.

I will make sure to rip the most scratched ones first, some of them are really bad and I am sure they won't be rescue able.

Thanks a lot guys!

[setarip_old]

@foog

Hi!Over the years I have bought around 900 DVDs...I just want to be able to put all my DVDs in 200 DVD casesJust curious to know if there's a typo here. If not, how would you put 900 DVDs into 200 cases?

[FishTank]

@foog

Hi!Just curious to know if there's a typo here. If not, how would you put 900 DVDs into 200 cases?

well duh :p
if you create 700mb xvid replicas, then you can use 7 movies per dvd, so easy to get to 200. (some movies need 1,4gig to look good though)

[FredThompson]

@foog

Hi!Just curious to know if there's a typo here. If not, how would you put 900 DVDs into 200 cases?
Fold them up. Sheesh!! :stupid:

[setarip_old]

@FishTank (and perhaps FredThompson)Perhaps the "Well duh" and "sheesh" are uncalled for? I'd suggest that you CAREFULLY reread the initial post - It refers to storing the ORIGINAL DVDs after creating backups:I just want to be able to put all my DVDs in 200 DVD cases and place them in my closet, have all of them backed up onto my computer some how

[FredThompson]

It should be obvious that you can't fold 900 discs up and put them into 200 cases. Smile. It's a JOKE!!! Sheesh!

[foxyshadis]

Fold them up. Sheesh!! :stupid:

If you're aiming for maximizing space, I used to gut cd jewel cases and pack the discs in with a thin tissue lining for a bit of scratch protection - you could fit 5 or 6 discs in one, I think. They were packed so tight that they always stayed secure sending cross-country! Of course for regularly used discs it's not such a great idea...

[FishTank]

@FishTank (and perhaps FredThompson)Perhaps the "Well duh" and "sheesh" are uncalled for? I'd suggest that you CAREFULLY reread the initial post - It refers to storing the ORIGINAL DVDs after creating backups:

first of all, i didnt mean to offend you, thats why i put the :p there ;)
i guess i made a fool out of myself if nothing else heh, but im
used to that lmao.

@foog..
im backing up my dvds, too, and i use RI4M/AGK. it takes 3 hours
per movie, which imho is great, but i only have 200 dvds, not
900 and im in no hurry to get it done.

[foog]

@foog

Hi!Just curious to know if there's a typo here. If not, how would you put 900 DVDs into 200 cases?

The cases hold 200 Discs. Bad wording on my part. :p

You know the CD Folders you buy at Wal-Mart that hold 200. I have my collection spread across 5 of them and I put the original cases in boxes for storage in my basement. It makes stuff easier to find and it takes up less space that way.

This is going to be a very loooong process.

[legoman666]

As other people have said, the pure amount of encoding time to convert 900 dvd's to xvid/divx/h264 would be at best realtime. Assuming 1.5hours per movie, that's 56.25 days. But as you said, you tried 1 movie with divx and that took 3.5 hours. 3.5hours/movie would be 131.25 days. You'd be better off buying enough space to just simply rip the dvd's in IFO mode using an app like DVDecrypter and leave the video/audio untouched. Sure, the hard drives required might cost a fair amount, but the amount of time you'd save would be substantial. Ripping a DVD only takes ~12 minutes. Assuming (falsely) that all of your dvd's are single layer, you'd be looking at 4.7gb * 900 = 4230gb at minimum.

Besides, if you converted all your movies to dvix/xvid/h264, to burn the movie back to DVD, you'd have to spend even more time converting it to DVD compliant mpeg2 stream. Just save yourself the time and trouble and leave them untouched; buy lots of hard drives. Seeing as how you have 900 dvd's, i'm sure you have the money.

[delacroixp]

I came accross a not entirely dissimilar thread sometime ago on Digital Video Storage (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=124411) which may be of assistance...
I should mention that 'even if you think about transcoding... there will be a loss of quality' and that unless you love encoding with lots of spare time and a fairly potent rigg (computer system... like dual/quad core)... direct copy/rip of ISO's is probably the best option overall...

It might be feasible to rip the most-tarnished DVD's first (as recommended by techreactor), keep them on a HDD... and hang around for HD/BluRay to burn the images to disk at that time...


:):D:eek:
Pascal

[delacroixp]

The cases hold 200 Discs. Bad wording on my part. :p

You know the CD Folders you buy at Wal-Mart that hold 200. I have my collection spread across 5 of them and I put the original cases in boxes for storage in my basement. It makes stuff easier to find and it takes up less space that way.

It may be worthwile to display some of your favourite movies in their original cases... on a bookshelf or bookcase in the lounge...
They often make for quite a beautifull decoration or talking point for guests... the same way many people display their favourite books or display their hi-fi system, especially if it's a good-looking system like B&O (http://www.bang-olufsen.com/page.asp?bhcp=1).


:):D:eek:
Pascal

[jeffy]

Do you know that there really are things like these?
http://www.american-digital.com/prodsite/product.asp?p=2027
http://www.american-digital.com/prodsite/product.asp?p=1052
http://www.tdk.com/consumer/acc/dvdquadcase.html
So even 900 original DVD discs might be stored in 225 cases... :D

[delacroixp]

@jeffy
I've come across cases that hold 6 or even 8 DVD'swhich is really nice for a series collection...
6 DVD Alphapak (http://www.sleevetown.com/shop/6_DVD_Alphapak_(Case_of_40).html)
Effectuality Inc (https://www.effectuality.com/store/item.php/name/Sextuple_DVD_Case/product/view/itemid/62/catid/6/store/us/lng/en#)
Sleeve City (http://www.sleevetown.com/multi-dvd-case.shtml)

@foog
I think you'll have to get hold of morph166955 and his 8 CPU monster (x264 multi-core (4+) threading optimization (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=124557)) which would probably speed through your encodes in several weeks...


:):D:eek:
Pascal

[jeffy]

@jeffy
I've come across cases that hold 6 or even 8 DVD'swhich is really nice for a series collection...



:):D:eek:
Pascal

Thanks for the ones holding 8 discs. Never heard about them before!

[delacroixp]

Thanks for the ones holding 8 discs. Never heard about them before!
Never seen one myself actually...


:):D:eek:
Pascal