Agree or disagree? (Rip the disc, don't bother with burn)

[skoy]

Here's my thought: Have been using wonderful DvdFab for so many years. Almost always ripping and saving the files from original discs work. Keep the folders (movie titles) in external drives, attach them to your old laptop (Don't recycle it and keep it around) and play them on your tv. I have never had an issue where they did not play. Most of the problems stem from burnt discs. Some standalone players refuse to play them, you realize you are collecting too many discs, you have to get binders or sleeves, etc. The discs you burn unfortunately won't last forever. Heck, I copy few movies onto thumb drive and take it with me with laptop and hdmi cable when I travel. A tv is always available in a friend's house or a hotel room. Sooner or later blank discs will be obsolete.

[signals]

Agree, but not because burned discs won’t play for me. Hard drives are cheap and smaller and my iPhone 6s+ display is large enough to watch for travel. I keep some DVD and BD blank discs for testing but have not purchased any in over 6 years.

[wgk.derdicke]

I agree, too. And I didn't bother with the burning right from the start. Since the late 1990s I am puchasing DVDs and later BDs, too. Quite a few are piled up here. I was getting annoyed messing around with the discs. In 2015 I decided to rip all of them. Huge disc space became available and affordable, DVDFab takes care of the rest. The DVDs are ripped to ISO files, my Fantec player handles ISO files like inserted DVDs in a DVD player. The BDs are ripped to folders and the movies as well as the bonus material are extracted as BD ISO without menu or MKV files, because my Fantec player does not handle BD menus. The whole data is stored on two Synology NAS at the moment with overall 1,2 TiB disc space at the moment. With tendency to rise.

[skoy]

Very interesting wgk.derdicke....Now, I am curious. If u don't mind answering my questions.

1-Any reason u prefer ISO files? I believe they r exact copies of original discs.
2-It looks like NAS (network attached storage) is a giant version of portable external drive. Are all the movie ISOs listed alphabetically or r u able to create folders (say comedy, action, etc) and organize them?
3- If the Fantec player does not recognize BD menu (to skip all the extra junk and start the show right away), r u stuck watching the entire file?

Thank u if u have time.

Is this similiar to what u have?

[wgk.derdicke]

In case of DVDs I copy the full disc as ISO file. In case of BDs I copy the full disc as movie folder. Both times DVDFab is used. The media player, a Fantec 3DAluPlay, handles DVD ISOs very well like an inserted DVD in a DVD player. The player does not handle BD menu at all. So I extract all movie content from the BD movie folder with the following procedure:

• To identify the proper playlist numbers of the main movie and the bonus material I use PowerDVD and Procmon64 on my PC
• Due to some sync issues with the audio and/or the subtitles I use Clown BD with eac3to, tsMuxeR and ImgBurn instead of DVDFab to rip the movie from the BD movie folders
• Most of the BDs I could handle with Clown BD. Some special audio formats can't be handled by eac3to, so I use tsMuxeR with the tsMuxerGUI instead
• The BD ISO created this way comes without any menu, contains only a single playlist and my media player handles such rudimentary BD ISO very well
• The bonus material is ripped to MKV by MKVToolNix using the MKVToolNix GUI
• If available, both files, the BD ISO and the MKV file, contains all german and english audio and subtitle tracks

So I do not have to bother with a BD menu. Though a little disadvantage comes with this procedure. I have to rip movies like Avatar - the BD contains all three versions on one single discs - to three different BD ISOs, each of them contains one of the three versions.

Indeed, the NAS acts as a giant external drive.

I categorized all movie files by using folders. There are several folders named like "Adventure", "Action" , "Fantasy", "Science Fiction" and "Western", for example.

The Babylon 5 TV show, for example, is placed in a subfolder called "Babylon 5" in the "Science Fiction" folder. For each season there is another subfolder called "Season x" (x represents the season number) in the "Babylon 5" folder. The "Season x" folder contains all the ISO files from the "season x" DVD box.

The James Bond movie series, for example, is placed in a subfolder called (one can imagine) "James Bond" in the "Action" folder. First I purchased the DVD version, the ISO files of those version is stored in another subfolder called "Filme SD" ("Filme" is the german expression for "movies"). The later purchased BD version is stored in the "Filme HD" subfolder. In this folder there are again subfolders, each for every movie named like "03 Goldinger BD M0846". The Goldfinger movie is the third of this series, this explains the "03" and the number at the end is a consecutive number. Each disc gets such a number so I can identify the disc in my database.

With this folder structure I can easily navigate to every movie or TV show stored on this NAS.

[skoy]

Wow! Very impressive. Everything u do seem (to me at least) to require a lot of knowledge and time. My biggest fear is digital files (movies) you create might get corrupted and become unplayable in the future. I had few bad experiences where some thumb drives eventually failed. Therefore, I always make several copies of my most important files (tax returns, photos, etc.) But, that is almost impossible with gigantic data. I have a huge collection of movies, tv shows saved on 6 2TB and 4TB external drives, hoping I will outlast them as a middle aged man!.

Thanks again for u taking time and explaining your system.

Schönes Wochenende.

[wgk.derdicke]

That's for sure, it takes time. Professionally, IT is somehow indirectly part of my work. However, my work has nothing to do with serves or data centers, etc. But learning by doing brings knowledge. At least if you are not born yesterday.

Keeping serveral copies of the most important files is a very good backup strategy. But as you pointed out, it's nearly impossible to backup really big data without spending a great deal of money.

Strictly speaking, my "backup strategy" isn't a true backup strategy. But first of all, to all movie and TV show files I hold the original discs. Secondly, the BD movie folders are stored on one server, the extracted BD ISO/MKV files are stored on the other server. And thirdly, the hard drives of each server are organized as a RAID 6 array. So up to two drives of each server can be fail without data loss. Although I have to be careful not to delete any data due to carelessness. And in the medium run I plan to purchase a third server which will hold a copy of the DVD ISO files.

[wgk.derdicke]

...I told nonsens about the disc space in my initial post. It's actually 120 TiB. Two NAS with 13 and 15 hard drives with 6 TB disc space each in RAID 6 arrays.

[yiteurp]

I agree, I started ripping, because I hated going to the shelf, looking for a disk, loading it, waiting for the previews , then watching the movie, taking it out, putting it away and then back on the shelf. using a media player is so much more friendly

[skoy]

We all like convenience, don't we? You have an excellent reason. Let's just hope digital files we create outlast us.