The Home Cinema Topic - How To Rip Your DVDs page1

Beans wrote:

Drunken_Master wrote:You're a bit of a dinosaur Beans. Basically, the advantage is you can have all of your media centralised. You never have to find a DVD/Blu ray again. Browsing is just a matter of flicking through a menu deciding upon what you want to watch.

I'm aware of the benefits. It just sounds like so much work. I have about 300 DVD's and it just frightens me how long it would take me to rip them

Would probably be easier to download them.

Think of all the space you'd save.

Drunken_Master wrote:

plain_dead_lazy wrote:3) It can't download shows like Game of Thrones every week - that would be great - maybe somebody has set this up?

How do you download stuff? If you use torrents or newsgroups you could use couchpotato

http://couchpotatoapp.com/

This'll allow you to download stuff you want automatically, and then it'd just be a matter of Boxee scanning any new stuff.

http://sickbeard.com/

Actually, you want Sickbeard for TV and Couchpotato for movies.

Thanks for that - I'll have a look at that.

Drumstick wrote:Yo BID0, could we get pictures of your various set ups?

Sure I think there is a AV setup thread somewhere, I'll link to that when I find it.

My Mum and Dads setup that I'm doing is almost finished. So far getting everything in one place (photo albums, cds, dvds, blurays, vinyls, tapes) has taken around around a year and a half. Sounds a lot but I've only put in about a few hours a week.

I'll try and get some YouTube stuff uploaded too.

plain_dead_lazy wrote:Great idea for a new topic - don't want to steal your thunder, but thought I'd throw in my system:

Nice I nearly got a Boxee box myself for downstairs, but went for a custom build in the end as they still hadn't been released in the UK.

Drunken_Master wrote:

Beans wrote:

Drunken_Master wrote:You're a bit of a dinosaur Beans. Basically, the advantage is you can have all of your media centralised. You never have to find a DVD/Blu ray again. Browsing is just a matter of flicking through a menu deciding upon what you want to watch.

I'm aware of the benefits. It just sounds like so much work. I have about 300 DVD's and it just frightens me how long it would take me to rip them

Would probably be easier to download them.

Think of all the space you'd save.

Aye download them I've only bothered to rip the things that haven't been available via torrents/rapidshare or that haven't been ripped properly/poor quality.

It takes around 2.5 hours to rip a DVD properly. I will be writting a guide that follows the Scene rules. There are lots of ways of doing it, but this way will be free and you'll always get fantastic quality rips without ending up with massive file sizes.


Looks like Drunken_Master will answer any questions while I type bits up

For my films and TV shows, I rip my DVDs using iRip and convert them with Handbrake.

Drunken_Master, probably will save a lot of time by downloading them, but I have a couple of reasons for that:

1) Quality Control - I can rely on my DVDs being properly converted
2) Burned in Subtitles - My wife and I are deaf, so I burn in the subtitles so we don't have to select subtitles. Maybe should have left in the option to select them or not, but I realised this by the 200th DVD, and I wasn't going to go back!
3) Internet download limit - I recently started downloaded some shows like Sons of Anarchy, and just received a letter telling I had exceeded my download limit
4) I'm scared that my Internet provider will grass me up to the film companies

Having two young children means that they like to handle and destroy gooseberry fool, and DVDs are very vulnerable to snot and saliva, and putting them all away in a Hard Drive seems like a good idea.... Also, there's a lot less mess around the living room, without having 300+ DVDs in shelves and so on...

oooh, good thread.

My Current Setup:

Laptop 1 - My everyday use laptop. Connects to Laptop 2 via VNC.

Laptop 2 - Connected to TV and Harddrives, Running XBMC. Also used for Downloads.

HD 1 - 1 Terrabyte (Movies, TV Shows)
HD 2 - 500GB (Music Documents, Apps)
HD 3 - 2Terrabyte (Backup of HD 1 and 2)

Pro's

XBMC is great, once you get it configured properly. It also scrapes sites like IMDB.com for info, and gives you a nice looking UI to browse all your movies and TV Shows. Loads of different themes you can DL for it too, as well as addons (Weather, News etc)

With VNC I can just remote onto Laptop2 and do anything I like with it. Makes it nice and easy to browse large collections of files. Or if I don't need the big screen I can just go in via network drives.

Also, there's a mod that will allow me to use my Kinnect with it. (havent done this yet though)

Cons

Laptop 2 needs to be on at all times. Having said that, I use it as my download machine so is usally D'Ling something anyway. and the factthe screen is usually off means hopefully it doesn't use too much Power anyway.

Laptop 2 is connected by VGA as no HDMI ports.

I couldn't imagine going back to just using DVD's now. The only tip I would give people is make sure you have backups of your Drives. I lost...well about a Terrabyte of stuff when I pulled the HD off my table by accident. Was gutted and had to start all over again. I now take a monthly backup.

BID0 wrote:
It takes around 2.5 hours to rip a DVD properly. I will be writting a guide that follows the Scene rules. There are lots of ways of doing it, but this way will be free and you'll always get fantastic quality rips without ending up with massive file sizes.


Looks like Drunken_Master will answer any questions while I type bits up

2.5 hours to rip a DVD? It tends to take me around 30 mins to rip a DVD, but I use a Mac - I then convert the disc image to take out the movie from all the extra gooseberry fool like trailers and "Downloading is Stealing" etc. This might take 2 hours or so.

Is that what you mean by ripping a DVD? Do you include the extras or just the movie itself?

plain_dead_lazy wrote:

BID0 wrote:
It takes around 2.5 hours to rip a DVD properly. I will be writting a guide that follows the Scene rules. There are lots of ways of doing it, but this way will be free and you'll always get fantastic quality rips without ending up with massive file sizes.


Looks like Drunken_Master will answer any questions while I type bits up

2.5 hours to rip a DVD? It tends to take me around 30 mins to rip a DVD, but I use a Mac - I then convert the disc image to take out the movie from all the extra gooseberry fool like trailers and "Downloading is Stealing" etc. This might take 2 hours or so.

Is that what you mean by ripping a DVD? Do you include the extras or just the movie itself?

I follow scene rules which state you have to do certain things in a certain order.

I use a program to rip the VOB files from the disc. I always just select the main film/episode, but it is possible to rip all of the extra features too if you wish. You can also chose to not rip certain things from the film like subtitles and different audio tracks, you might only want english subs and not sweedish for example. From memory this will take about 10-15 minutes.

Then you join the VOB files together and seperate the audio. This takes a few minutes.

Then you crop the video and make sure it is the correct aspect ratio so it plays on nearly all devices. Cropping it also gets rid of any black bars added to the DVD/Blu Ray which helps save file size.

Then you join the audio back up to the video and make 2 passes so you don't have any audio sync issues and get the best quality video possible. It will use a lower bitrate for the end credits for example than a big action sequence. You could probably get away with a single pass but I always do the two. Each pass is just over an hour normally.

End result is a 700MB movie with comparable quality to the original DVD. You can make the filesize higher/lower if you wish though, but I've found that to be the best size/quality ratio.

It sounds quite complicated, but once you've done a DVD there isn't much to do setup wise it's just a case of ripping a DVD then leaving it too do it's thing.

I can usually rip movies at... just over 1:1, time-wise. It takes like, 2 hours to do a 1:45 movie, sort of thing. Converting HD movies takes chuffing ages, though. I've been converting The Social Network since 2, and I've still got an hour left.

I've just connected my TV to it's aerial, so I can watch digital TV now I'll get some pictures of my setup up later.

Tafdolphin wrote:So these NAS devices are sort of like localised Cloud storage right?

They do exactly what it says on the tin: Network Attached Storage.

I got my brother one of these last christmas and it seems pretty happy with it:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Live-Hub-Media-Center-1TB/dp/B00466IEXE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1308067509&sr=8-1
It plays most file types with the exception of flv(or at least it didn't play flv when I bought it) and the user interface is pretty nice. The built in hard drive works well for the setup he has but its not of much use if you are planning on streaming everything.

This is a thread I can get behind.

It may be an idea to give people a guide of self build HTPC's. Especially with the new AMD ITX chips/board combos.

The problem is downloading them is liable to attract the attentions of the media companies lawyers. Also, its difficult to guarantee the quality of an internet file, whereas you can make your own decisions on files you format shift yourself.

The boxee windows app is great. I use that connected via hdmi to my tv and control it with an app on my phone.

BID0 wrote:

plain_dead_lazy wrote:

BID0 wrote:
It takes around 2.5 hours to rip a DVD properly. I will be writting a guide that follows the Scene rules. There are lots of ways of doing it, but this way will be free and you'll always get fantastic quality rips without ending up with massive file sizes.


Looks like Drunken_Master will answer any questions while I type bits up

2.5 hours to rip a DVD? It tends to take me around 30 mins to rip a DVD, but I use a Mac - I then convert the disc image to take out the movie from all the extra gooseberry fool like trailers and "Downloading is Stealing" etc. This might take 2 hours or so.

Is that what you mean by ripping a DVD? Do you include the extras or just the movie itself?

I follow scene rules which state you have to do certain things in a certain order.

I use a program to rip the VOB files from the disc. I always just select the main film/episode, but it is possible to rip all of the extra features too if you wish. You can also chose to not rip certain things from the film like subtitles and different audio tracks, you might only want english subs and not sweedish for example. From memory this will take about 10-15 minutes.

Then you join the VOB files together and seperate the audio. This takes a few minutes.

Then you crop the video and make sure it is the correct aspect ratio so it plays on nearly all devices. Cropping it also gets rid of any black bars added to the DVD/Blu Ray which helps save file size.

Then you join the audio back up to the video and make 2 passes so you don't have any audio sync issues and get the best quality video possible. It will use a lower bitrate for the end credits for example than a big action sequence. You could probably get away with a single pass but I always do the two. Each pass is just over an hour normally.

End result is a 700MB movie with comparable quality to the original DVD. You can make the filesize higher/lower if you wish though, but I've found that to be the best size/quality ratio.

It sounds quite complicated, but once you've done a DVD there isn't much to do setup wise it's just a case of ripping a DVD then leaving it too do it's thing.

I do a single pass

I used to do a two-pass but didn't really notice any video quality issues - although I won't be able to detect any audio issues - it wouldn't affect me but my two children aren't deaf... my brother in law has said that the sound is fine so...

Hasn't considered cropping either!

What system do you use?

I use a Core Duo 2 iMac with 4GB RAM.

1) Quality Control - I can rely on my DVDs being properly converted

In the app I linked you to, Couch Potato, you can specify quality settings. Like HD rips for instance. You've paid for the DVD, so why shouldn't you be able to download a HD rip of the same film?

Burned in Subtitles - My wife and I are deaf, so I burn in the subtitles so we don't have to select subtitles. Maybe should have left in the option to select them or not, but I realised this by the 200th DVD, and I wasn't going to go back!

Is it really much of a pain to choose a .srt file before the film starts? XBMC, Boxee will allow you to download them and they really aren't that big.

3) Internet download limit - I recently started downloaded some shows like Sons of Anarchy, and just received a letter telling I had exceeded my download limit

When I say download your library I didn't mean in one go. You could use Couch Potato or something to queue them up. Also, I thought download limits were things of the past. hey ho.

4) I'm scared that my Internet provider will grass me up to the film companies

Use Newsgroups. It's completely anonymous.

Drunken_Master wrote:

4) I'm scared that my Internet provider will grass me up to the film companies

Use Newsgroups. It's completely anonymous.

Not all. To be properly secure you should spring for the SSL providers.

Falsey wrote:

Drunken_Master wrote:

4) I'm scared that my Internet provider will grass me up to the film companies

Use Newsgroups. It's completely anonymous.

Not all. To be properly secure you should spring for the SSL providers.

Aye, true say.

I'm quite happy using Virgin's free newsgroup access. Seems ironic, on the one hand they're one of the providers who have said they'd co-operate and have over details of users caught downloading gooseberry fool from torrents, and on the other hand they've only gone and given us free newsgroup access.


Also, if people do insist on using torrents, then you really should use torrents with private trackers and protect yourself with PeerGuardian.

Drunken_Master wrote:

Falsey wrote:

Drunken_Master wrote:

4) I'm scared that my Internet provider will grass me up to the film companies

Use Newsgroups. It's completely anonymous.

Not all. To be properly secure you should spring for the SSL providers.

Aye, true say.

I'm quite happy using Virgin's free newsgroup access. Seems ironic, on the one hand they're one of the providers who have said they'd co-operate and have over details of users caught downloading gooseberry fool from torrents, and on the other hand they've only gone and given us free newsgroup access.


Also, if people do insist on using torrents, then you really should use torrents with private trackers and protect yourself with PeerGuardian.

I largely rely on the fact that mostly I'm downloading rips of things I actually own a legit copy of. Granted format-shifting isn't currently exactly legal under British law, but i think it's likely to become so.

Is the Boxee software the best to use or is there better software available?

tomvek wrote:Is the Boxee software the best to use or is there better software available?

It depends what you want really.

I found Boxee to be more focused around the American market, so most of the TV show streams (it's best feature in my opinion) can not be accessed. I'm not sure weather ITV and 4oD have been added yet?