Here's something that I've been considering for quite some time and I just wanted to know if anyone else here has already traveled down this path...

Dilemma - Too many DVDs and never in the place we wanna watch them.

400+ Movies and tons of TV series all in our family room on one wall of shelves. The wall is FULL and frankly it's getting out of hand.

Sure we have our best TV in the family room and usually watch movies on the HD set.... but... every once and again we might want to watch something in the bedroom or on the computer room TV or maybe on the little kitchen TV (but we don't even have a DVD player on that one).

My idea (not a new idea) I'm positive many others have already done this... is to rip them to storage system - NAS / RAID / etc (I'd do the movies first and leave the TV stuff on DVD) and then have the ability to access the ripped movies from anywhere I can get a wired (or wireless) network connection.

I know how to rip movies and I've even done about a dozen as a test... Pretty painless but here are some issues I'm struggling with.

Cover Art:
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Does any ripper and/or standalone program AUTOMATICALLY detect a DVD and then go out to the net to grab appropriate movie cover-art?

Play Back:
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I realize every TV will need some type of computer (or other standalone media playing device) to allow us to browse and play back the movies I have ripped to the NAS / RAID / bunch-of-disks / etc... Does anyone know of a relatively inexpensive way to make this work? I'd rather NOT have a big honkin' PC (with fans a blazing) next to each TV.

Storage:
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I can regularly pick up Seagate 7200.10 300GB SATA-2 drives for under $100 but what about a case to house them... All of the multi-hard-drive enclosures seem ridiculously EXPENSIVE... I've seen 4 drive EMPTY enclosures for over $400 - Heck that's more than what I'd pay for the dives themselves!!!

Frontends:
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Lastly, what kind of front-ends are there that allow you to browse, search, categorize and play the DVD's that I've ripped to the hard drives? Something 'wife friendly' is a must... :D


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Well I'm all ears.... I just hope some of you have already / or / are thinking about doing this too and have some advise to share.

Dave

I know what you mean and while I don't have as many as you you I think about storage every time I look at my DVD collection. Particularly with Blu-ray and HD-DVD's gradually coming out I can see my wall overwhelmed with an abundance of DVD's and other media.

Cover Art:
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Does any ripper and/or standalone program AUTOMATICALLY detect a DVD and then go out to the net to grab appropriate movie cover-art?
I have never heard of such a feature, and I'm sure that if it did do this it would most likely pick up a low quality cover-art.


Storage:
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I can regularly pick up Seagate 7200.10 300GB SATA-2 drives for under $100 but what about a case to house them... All of the multi-hard-drive enclosures seem ridiculously EXPENSIVE... I've seen 4 drive EMPTY enclosures for over $400 - Heck that's more than what I'd pay for the dives themselves!!!Ripping a DVD to the hard drive can be expensive depending on how many you are going to rip etc. Assuming that you aren't going to compress the DVD you are looking at over 6GB for 1 DVD (keeping in mind special features discs) or movies that run over 2 DVDs (i.e Schindlers List). So assuming that that each disc is 6GB (or thereabouts) you would only really have room for 50 movies. Of course this depends on how many movies to you want to backup.

Although once this is done, I know that systems with windows media Center OS sends the movie to a seperate box connected to you T.V via wireless LAN. But I believe that there are other similar methods without the media center just haven't looked into it.

I have been looking at purchasing a disc stacker such as this one by imation:

http://img161.imageshack.us/img161/1721/imationstakkawe1.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

I have seen it in use and its quite organized. You label all discs before putting them in and just need to type in the movie you want and it shoots it out :)

Of course none of these methods help with my biggest dilemma which is how to keep the covers on display. My main DVD display is full at the moment and so I keep rotating the the covers. I dread the day when I'll need to hide the covers in a cabinet. Hopefully by then I will have a large theatre room :D

there are a few ways of doing this the least expensive is..........
server tower with 4x 500gb drives connected to a pc......
on the tv out connection connect a av spliter unit......
then run av leads to each one of the screens that you want to watch the movie on......
then all you have to do is select the screen you want it on on the av spliter unit and you can watch it on that screen....

buy the way i would convert the main movie to divx as the room needed to store all of the dvd would be huge and not very productive.....

i did this for a friend in his new house and works a treat all the wiring was hidden in the walls as i did the wiring before he decorated......

hope this helps.......

not sure about the cover art bit...

Great stuff guys....

Yep, while I wasn't going to transcode to a lossy format divx/xvid/etc since I'd really like to keep the quality as best I can... I have no problem with ripping only the feature movie and soundtrack (and subtitles) and scrapping all the rest of the stuff. Heck if you want the 'full dvd experience' we'd still have the dvd in the family room. So that brings many/most of the movies down to 3GB to 4.5GB.

So if they average out to 4.2GB each... 400 movies * 4.2GB comes out to somewhere under 2TB of storage. With the latest Seagate drives at 750GB, I could build a 2.2TB RAID 5 array. I'd RAID 5 it so if/when a drive fails it doesn't bring down the whole shootin match but if I loose 2 drives at the same time I'm pretty sure I'd be up the creek with a paddle. :)

For distribution.... The house is apx 2400 sqft so I could run individual svideo drops to the 4 areas where I'd want to have access (Bedroom, Guest Room, Kitchen,Family Room) The computer room wouldn't need a run since that's where all the stuff will be operating.

The only issue that comes up would be being able to play different movies in different locations at the same time... That's why I was looking into some type of 'network media player' that I could connect to each TV and then EACH of the media player could mount the RAID full of movies pull the movie it was told to play from over the network... This way no matter what TV #1 was playing TV's #2, #3 & #4 could play whatever they wanted .

The media player (for each TV) also solves a few other potential issues...

- If a TV is HD (and the movie on the RAID is HD) it could play it to it's fullest quality. S-video wouldn't be able to do that.

- If the movie has 5.1 sound and any of the TV areas has an audio decoder and the xtra speakers they the better audio could be used too...

- Being able to browse, search, play, pause, stop a movie via a remote control would be easy (since the media player would have its own remote).

I guess they way I'm talking I've already convinced myself this is a good way to go... Provided that is I find a reasonably priced network media player that doesn't suck.. :lol:

Lets see....

4 TVs x 399 (I'm guessing) would be $1200 plus the drives lets say another 1200 (maybe less if I can hold out of deals that come around every so often) plus the enclosure $400...

Hmmm $2800 and that would give me a truly 'media on demand anytime anywhere' house. Not a bad deal and I'm sure people have spent a whole lot more than that to accomplish the same thing...

Now I'll just have to find the right media player... I'd guess AVSForums would be the best place to start.

Dave

Its a good idea because as you say it provides a 'media on demand anytime' solution. I suppose it depends in much one is willing to invest into such a system, keeping in mind that hard drive space will need to be upgraded as more DVD's are purchased. Hard drives may fail and need to be replaced etc.

The idea is great though, let us know what you come up with..

I am not sure of what the best media center solution would be but I would say that unless you are running HD-TV's that you are best off to rip to x264. This will save you space but still offer high quality. The quality of a x264 rip of the same size file as an xvid is way better. I currently use my xbox360 to connect to a media center PC. Its not the easiest solution since there is no native support for xvid so I gotta use the transcode360 workaround. Plus, it only works on the TV you have it connected to so you'd need a 360 for each PC. (kinda expensive)

Either way, I have over 250 xvids on my seagate 320 i can access on demand.

Maybe look into the original xbox and the XBMC?

--RAINMAN

Edit: I know you said you wanted lossless but to tell you the truth you will probably not notice a difference if you encode them properly, using the correct tools. And, you don't have to adhere to scene rules so you can make them however big you want with AC3, it will still save you significant space.

Rainman...

If I were to go the re-encoding route x.264 would be the way I'd go... and it's something I've almost considered (especially since I've already decided to rip the 'feature movie' only)...

The only real issue I have with encoding things is HDTV is already in the family room and quite soon that TV will migrate to the master bedroom and make way for a larger HDTV..

Also doesn't x.264 takes a pretty darn long time to do it's encoding (at a good quality)? I've got a C2D E6300 box...

Dave

This may be way off the wall. But as far as I can tell I think it might work for you.

Check this site: http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/eCS/Store/en/-/USD/SY_DisplayProductInformation-Start?CategoryName=hav_DVD_DVDPlayers&ProductSKU=DVPCX995V%2fKIT2&TabName=feature&DCMP=Google_HAV

This is a 400 disc DVD Changer.

Solution 1: You no longer need the cover art for the dvd disc because its always in the dvd player. You'll never have to look at it.

Solution 2: You will no longer have to have the massively large collection of dvd's on shelfs and cabinets all around the living room. Instead you can pick your most favorite ones and leave them up for display purposes only.

Solution 3: Nice thing about this DVD Changer is that it will play pretty much all types of media.

So this might be a cheaper solution than most maybe not quite what your looking for but I believe you will be satisfied with the results.

I would do so heavy research on a dvd changer. I just pick one that looked nice.

Hope that may help a little.