How to rip 900 DVDs minimizing space?

[evilnewbie]

I have about 900 DVDs and I want to rip them into my computer and share it to other computers and TV's... Since its a lot of movies I just want to get the movies off without any of the other special stuff... since space will be an issue, I want to be more efficient on how I rip the DVDs and looking for suggestions on how to proceed... thanks...

[hello_hello]

For ripping them, try RipIt4Me using "movie only" mode. You'll find it with Google. It requires DVD Decrypter and DVD Shrink to be installed.

If you want to convert them to another format to save space, that's a whole different story (you'll still have to rip them first though).

[evilnewbie]

I heard .avi or .mp4 are good formats to save it to... How much GB would a movie, on average, take up in .avi or .mp4 formats and is there a good tool to convert it to those formats? Thanks. I plan to have 5 Hitachi 3TB drives running (I hope I have enough space)... I'll add more if I need more...

[pelle412]

If you compress a DVD movie using x264 into a .mp4 or .mkv file, keeping surround sound, and using a high quality setting they'll end up around 1 - 2 Gb each.

As for tools, I use MeGUI, but there are many others available. To get the movie off the disc onto the computer I use AnyDVD.

[CWR03]

If you compress a DVD movie using x264 into a .mp4 or .mkv file, keeping surround sound, and using a high quality setting they'll end up around 1 - 2 Gb each.
I have no trouble ripping Blu-Ray movies of less than two hours into approx. 1.5 GB .mkv files at 720p resolution with 5.1 AC3 audio. A DVD should fall well under 1 GB.

[hello_hello]

My 720p Bluray rips seem to average about 3GB (CRF20) while my DVD encodes seem to average about 1.5GB (CRF19)... at a rough guess.

evilnewbie, for better quality you probably want to use anamorphic encoding for DVDs. MeGUI has an anamorphic encoding option.

[evilnewbie]

Thanks everyone...

[ramicio]

Keep whatever the native resolution is and just crop any letter- or pillar-boxing. Let the container and player deal with getting the aspect ratio correct. This will give you a slight speed boost for not having to re-size, and possibly space savings or quality savings (depending on what encoding method you use.) Make a table for person reference of common resolutions you will be feeding the encoder for the SAR and DAR calculations.

[Ghitulescu]

Well, before asking about AVI, MP4, MKV and the like, you should have already designed all the hardware details, as these will dictate the format you'll use for storing the movies.