Newbie seeking advice on

[maineman]

I'd like to make the following point to the gentlemen above. Instead of all this plugging and unplugging, etc of drives, why do you not use the players networking capabilities and make life a lot easier. Have the original rips on your workstation and the player will play them and then shift them to the hard drive of the Argosy over the network once encoded?

Simply because my home in Maine isn't set up properly for this.
It's taken longer than I'd hoped, but I'll finally be a permanent South Carolina resident in about 2 weeks.
Networked players here I come...

[maineman]

Ok - now an easy question - just buy 'DVDFab DVD Ripper' or should I get another version?

While everyone's given solid advice, the answers you seek, are dependent upon your wants, needs and budget.

Based on your statement of 100 dvds and a 2 TB hdd, DVD Copy is all you'll need just as signals advised.
You could just go with the freeware version, but this will be a watered-down version in terms of functionality and its decrypting capability
will lag behind the retail version by as much as 60 days or perhaps even longer.

Insofar as the picture quality, you'll have to judge for yourself.
No one knows what you're watching the flicks on and no one can determine what video quality is adequate to your eyes.
As I said, my standard dvd conversions are outstanding when viewed on a 42" HDTV via my Argosy.

Please try the conversion that GregiBoy posted and judge for yourself.
Here you go:


Additionally, no one knows what you mean by,
"I tried to copy a DVD some time ago and it took a couple of hours to do"

What did you actually do? how did you do it? and with what? (your rig's specs).

As an eg., I just converted Hereafter using GregiBoy's samsung profile.
(4.83 GB ---> 1.32 GB)
My time was about 10 minutes.

Also keep in mind that bundled software offers are cheaper, but not if you never use them.
Suppose you add to your dvd collection and storage on your 2 TB hdd becomes an issue?
Will you ever enter into Blu-ray discs and archiving BD files?

Many of us don't have clear-cut designs, but still, you should take into consideration what you can.

[big_brian]

When I tried to copy a dvd before - I didn't know what I was doing, couldn't figure out which format I wanted to use, and wasn't familiar with all the terms. I probably copied it 2 or 3 times before I got a copy I could use. It was a struggle.

I feel I am somewhat smarter now. I don't think I will be buying a Blue Ray DVDs for another couple of years or until they discontinue ordinary DVD's. I am quite happy with the normal DVD quality on my 50" Panasonic plasma that I have or an older 42" plasma Toshiba. They are not their top of the line models but are good enough for me.

My original goal was to use the NAS drive with a wifi media player at each TV (and I was hoping to stream it to my iPad). I think I can hardwire everything together as well - but wifi is much easier (but it appears to have problems as well).

Memory is cheap. 1,2, or 3 TB - not a huge price difference so it appears DVD copy will work for me. I am looking for ease of use in the software - not necessarily what is most efficient. I will have to do a bit more homework/investigation on which media player to get. I originally was going with the Sony media player because I could also control it with my ipad (as well as a HT receiver I was thinking of getting). The Argosy is definitely top of the list now!

Thanks again for all your good advice everyone has given me. I will dig around the website some more and try to educate myself more. Brian

[crackinhedz]

what I use to do with DVD's was copy the main movie only, and a single audio stream into a single .VOB file.

Then rename the .VOB file extension to .mpeg or .mpg

This saves from any transcoding time and/or quality loss.

[big_brian]

So what would be a typical non HD movie size un-compressed? Just trying to figure out if and when I would need a new HDD or if I should buy one now?

[GregiBoy]

if you are doing uncompressed DVD's, I would use 8.5Gb average per title in my calculations as this would be the worst case scenario.

Quite a lot of titles are less than this.

[Xalky]

If your gonna do "main movie only" you can reduce the file size to less than 5gb per title without compression. For Main movie only i'd figure 5gb per title and that'll be about right, on average.