Who's got the most impressive encoded collection? [bragging contest]

[Kent Wang]

A friend of mine recently declared that I probably have one of the Top 100 DivX collections in the world, so he got me thinking...

OK, who's got the most impressive encoded DVD collection? We're not comparing just the DVD's cause any sucker can go and drop $10K on a bunch of DVD's. I'm talking about just a encoded collection. This of course means that you probably ripped and encoded them yourself.

Criteria to look for:

1) Quantity.
2) Quality of selection (e.g., having Citizen Kane instead of Charlie's Angels). Of course this is a very subjective criterion.
3) Quality of encode. This is possibly the most important criterion.
4) Organization.

In addition, I think a limit of 3CD's per film should be imposed (you can have exceptions for super-long movies). That's a very liberable limit and should still disqualify VOB backups and silly mofos that just encode at 10,000kbps.

Since to have high quality encodes you probably need to read Doom9, I think we can get a very good sample of all the top collectors in the world.

[Kent Wang]

So, let me start off describing my collection:

Quantity: 202 films (~150GB), various TV series (~50GB).
Quality: Lots of classics (Citizen Kane, Casablanca), foreign (John Woo, Wong Kar-Wai), indie (Memento, Bamboozled), anime (Ninja Scroll, Jin-Roh). Plenty of blockbusters too (X-Men, LOTR). TV series: (Sopranos, Twin Peaks, Cowboy Bebop).
Encode: Most of my collection is DivX with MP3 soundtrack. My oldest encode is from a year ago (back in the days of DivX 4). I've recently switched to Xvid/Vorbis/OGM but only a few items in my current collection are in that format.
Organization: Dude, I have a god damn relational database and website that I wrote. I'll PM you the URL if you want to compare.

I usually add at least 5 titles a week and plan to re-encode a lot of the old stuff I have.

Hehe, so bring it on! I do excel in quantity, but I think my biggest weakness is my encode quality.

[2COOL]

OK, who's got the most impressive ripped DVD collection? We're not comparing just the DVD's cause any sucker can go and drop $10K on a bunch of DVD's. I'm talking about just a ripped collection. This of course means that you probably ripped and encoded them yourself.

To have the ultimate DVD backup, it should be a 100% copy of the original source disk. This is what I define as "bragging rights" if it is acheived. No one should notice that you are playing the backup in your player. But alas, it is not a simple thing to do for a lot of DVD-9s and flippers out there. I would say I've done over 500 DVDs but I wouldn't brag about the all of them being exactly the same as the original. I could do over a 1000 movie-only DVDs easily by passing them through DVD2One or DVD95Copy but it still wouldn't be the same.

Though you mention doing DivX, which I don't really do, I still have to give you credit for your encoding times and efforts. I used to do VCDs and SVCDs prior to DVDr so I know about long encoding times and multiple disks. But I only do DVDRs now for peace of mind as DVDs in, DVDRs out.

I just wanted to put my 2 cents in as when I read your thread title, I assumed that, by your meaning of collection, you meant a DVD backup collection not DivX. Maybe you could change your Title to stating a DivX collection? By the way, in your quote of saying a "ripped" collection, I always though the definition of ripping was just getting the DVD files unto the harddrive. That's easy to do. Doing what you want with these files is another thing.

[Kent Wang]

I did as you suggested and changed it to most impressive encoded collection. But you're right in pointing out how long these encodes take. I have a dedicated Athlon 2400 machine that's crunching frames at all times. This also implies that I'm getting new DVDs at a pretty brisk rate to keep the machine fed.

Now that I have a DVD burner, I'm making lossless backups in addition to compressing every DVD I get my hands on.

[smiller667]

When I see threads like this I do sometimes wonder if people actually saw and appreciated all those movies they encoded ... in my early years, collecting things for the sake of collecting was certainly fine, but nowadays, I take a different view.
A lot of titles I simply have to buy because there is no other way of renting or borrowing them, and for all the other titles - why bother? I used to go to the movie theater to pretty much watch any new movie that came out in our town, but no more, time is too valuable to waste on most movies.
I do appreciate the technical side of it, that challenge to achieve something which comes as close to the perfect backup (whatever it may be, avi or svcd or dvd-r) as possible, but after a while and achieving a certain standard, I realized that for me, the time is better spent on doing sth else (e.g. watch another movie).
To me, bragging about the size of a movie collection is essentially saying "mine is longer" or sth like that ... as long as it is not related to a knowledge and appreciation of movies, it is essentially worthless (I can't claim to be knowledgeable about movies myself, still an amateur).

Steve

[Atamido]

Even if you purchase DVDs, it is nice to back them up on a harddrive somewhere, and then keep the discs in a safe place. Having all of your DVD's stored on a central server, ready to play at any time is much more nice than dealing with the discs and risking scratches.

[Kent Wang]

Plus, I "could theoretically" share my encoded files with friends from my "theoretical FTP server."

Anyway, I'd say that my movie watching experience has probably been wildly accelerated and improved by my collection hobby. With the assurance that I will have an indestructible copy (through redundancy and backups) I now pursue new DVDs with a new zeal. Otherwise renting movies feels like a totally fleeting purchase with no lingering possession other than your memory of the film. Practically, collecting has little true value but it's all about the warm fuzzy feeling.

And yes, I've watched every single title I have encoded.

[Richard Berg]

No way can 200GB of material puts you in the Worldwide Top 100. There are several folks on my p2p hub of choice (myself included) who are sharing 1TB+, and the distribution only fans out from there. I don't go bragging about it because I'm a developer geek, not a movie buff, but FYI.

[killingspree]

ahem, i don't want to spoil this thread but i have the impression that this is coming very close to a rule 6 violation

steVe

[Richard Berg]

Who said these collections were DVD backups (which are illegal in the US and nations with DMCA-like laws)? My material, for one, is captured from TV duly paid for.

[wmansir]

To keep this kosher we should talk about our collection and not what questionable activities we do with it.

I don't have an accurate count right now, but I would estimate I have 800-900 CDs, all but 60-70 are SVCD, and for the most part those are divx (mostly divx3 but a couple Divx4, which was just coming out when I switched to SVCD). I also have half a dozen realvideo CDs for anime that doesn't take to SVCD well. I usually add a minimum of 3 movies a week, although sometimes I'll go crazy and add 6-7 or a TV series (a season, not the whole thing).

As to the material itself, in addition to the normal popular modern stuff, it's a mixed bag of my favorite genres. A lot of classics and film noir, some modern indie/foreign (semi-popular stuff like Ghost World and Lola Rennt, no too much obscure stuff), TV (Sopranos, Buffy, Simpsons, ect), some Anime (again semi-popular stuff). I also have my favorite actors/directors like Kurosawa (still need Throne of Blood), Audrey Hepburn, Steve Mcqueen, Kubrick, Clint Eastwood (spaghetti western Clint, not Dirty Harry or hangin with a monkey Clint) so I have a bunch of their works.

If I must say so myself the encoding quality is very good. I know "It's only SVCD...", but I prefer the format for the convenience. If I had a set-top Divx player I might switch to Divx, but I think currently the money would be better spent on DVD-R, which I also can't afford.

All encodes were done by me, by hand (no DVD2SVCD). I pick the cutting points, so scenes don't get butchered , fadein/out, ect. If the DVD had director's commentary (or two) they are intact, although in low bitrate mono. I don't keep score tracks or non-english tracks (for english movies). Non-english movies get hard-subs if their is no english track, otherwise they get both languages and selectable subs (with native track getting favorable treatment if necessary). I would probably do selectable subs regardless if software DVD players could display them.

As far as organization goes, there is very little. I started to catalog them a few months ago with the intention of adding new encodes to the database as I complete them but I forgot about it, and now I don't know where to start. That's the information organization, physical organization is even worse. 500+ of these CDs are sitting on spindles, I really need to get a few big CD wallets. I have spindles stacked all over the place, it's really a mess. I do have a 264 CD wallet with some of my favorite movies, alphabetically organized with a printout list taped to the inside (done around the time I started cataloging, I must have been inspired) and a couple of 64 CD wallets, one is full of Buffy Episodes, the other Sopranos and Larry Sanders, I think. But the movies are in chaos for the most part.

[jeremymacmull]

OOOOH i like this topic

Ok here goes

I have 1297 movies ( I said movies not discs ie if a movie is 2-3 discs this counts as one) 70% encoded by me most done using divx 3 and nandub as i used to do a lot before i used gknot now all done using divx 5.05 most have mp3 at least at 140 k and above hovever a lot 30% have AC3 about 5% have ogg.

Good collections that I have are ALL the 007 bonds All encoded by me with multiple soundtracks 2 cds each and ogg sound. All the aliens, Rambos, Rocky's, Robocops and a hell of a lot of jackie chan and jet li films mostly if not all encoded by me.

I also have 511 cds of anime of which 40% ish were encoded by myself

I have 344 cds of tv series (ie star trek etc) of which 30% were encoded by myself and about 40% by friends of mine

I have all the Voyager, TNG, DS9 and Friends, Sopranos, Black Adder, Family Guy, Futurama, Red Dwarf, West Wing and 24 thats been out so far

Organised in an access database by case number, Genre (anime, movies tv series etc) and Title.

Not bad Aye!!!

JEREMY

:devil:

[Kent Wang]

Perhaps a corollary to this thread is how did you encode all this? I have a dedicated Athlon 2400 and I think the most movies that I could crank out in a week is 14. I do re-encode whenever something's not exactly 699MB so this usually means that I encode every movie about 2 or 3 times. I guess if I didn't do that, I could push out 35 movies a week. Damn, now that would be a lot.

However, this is only with DivX 5. I've only started playing with Xvid, but it seems that I might be restricted to only 7 movies a week.

I just watched The Pianist last night, and though I didn't enjoy the film very much (too slow and boring) I did spend a lot of the time admiring the encode quality.

[OvERaCiD23]

After encoding video for a little over 1.5 years now, I have right around 200 movies (I'll get the exact number later from XMM), nearly all of them are 2 CD rips (DivX4 & DivX5) with the original AC3 track. I have a few 1 CD rips with MP3 audio from my early days, but not too many. Most of my movies are just normal movies that most people have seen, nothing too special. Just thought I'd chime in with what I've encoded over all this time.

[jfcarbel]

I noticed that you all had some TV encodes in your lists.

I have avoided doing this because of the difficulty of hybrids like Star Trek, where 24fps is mixed with 29.97 interlaced. All solutions I have heard produce jittery video in certain parts.

If many of you have solved this, then could you please post your AviSynth scripts you used and whether they are for DVD or TV Caps. This would be very helpful to me. I have been wanting to do all my ST:TNG and DS9 DVDs to a Divx DVD for future Divx suported DVD players.

My current project has invloved capturing every Seinfeld episode from DirectTV on to DVD. I have 2 more episodes I need. I wish when I started that I encoded the AVI to both MPEG2 and Divx. Now I am going thru all then and using DVD2AVI to reencode them to Divx which I assume will add a layer of generational loss, but so far they look pretty good since the MPEG2 is at 3300 VBR using CCE.

Thanks.

[Kent Wang]

I think most of us are actually doing rips of series that have been released on DVD. At least that's what I'm doing.

[Kent Wang]

Originally posted by Richard Berg
No way can 200GB of material puts you in the Worldwide Top 100. There are several folks on my p2p hub of choice (myself included) who are sharing 1TB+, and the distribution only fans out from there.

Yeah, I've seen those shares and they are CRAP. They're 1) mostly filled with gamez and warez, 2) incredibly disorganized, 3) poor quality encodes, 4) zero original content, all encoded by some other one-click distro group. Given enough time, anyone can download 1TB of crap from Kazaa and share it. I have never seen any shares on DC (which is my P2P of choice) that has even 50GB of content that is of the same quality as my collection.

[Richard Berg]

All I'll say is, you're on the wrong hub. Can't speak for everyone, but the top 3 guys I referred to are meticulously organized. I spend more time sorting my collection than I do watching :)

[Wilbert]

@Kent Wang,
This thread is going nowhere, and general talk about stuff you can find on Kazaa is not really allowed here.

Thread closed.