So first I'll just say that it's nice to be back to blogging. I'm going to try once again to get in the habit of writing a lot more often and see if I can stick with it this time...

This brings me to my real reason for being here, my new project. Project is a loose term here, basically I'm ripping my entire DVD collection. Ripping my DVD's you say? How or why would you rip a DVD? Well I'll tell you....

I think we are very close to critical mass in terms of storage vs. functionality. The main reason that MP3 caught on when it did was that for the size of the file it was very price effective to have thousands of them. The collections people owned would actually fit on any computer they owned so ripping your CD's to MP3 made a lot of sense. Then along came the iPod and proved that this would be true....

I think we are very close to that point for DVD. I recently purchased 2 200GB hard drives for $30 each. I added them to my NAS (network attached storage) at home for a whopping 1.4 TB (that's 1,400GB) of space. Right now I have about 500GB free on it and I have other drives in my home totaling 2.4 TB (so 2,400GB). So I decided that I had the room and I set out to find out how to do it.

I spent about a month with Google off and on trying to find software that would fit my needs. I decided that if I was going to undertake this project I wanted the video equal to a 128k CBR MP3 (the lowest quality that passes for "CD Quality"). Actually I wanted a bit higher than this, but that was my base line - what I mean is I wanted it to be almost as good as DVD. So what does that mean?

Video
Well for video knew I really only had 2 choices that interested me, DivX/XviD or WMV. The only reason that I even considered the latter is that it would be able to play on my Media Center Extender device (that can't play DivX/XviD). But in the end I decided that XviD was the best choice, simply because I was able to find a free encoder that would give me VERY high quality video and audio (more on that in a minute). XviD is an open codec so it's free for anyone to use and the quality of the video I'm doing is very close to the original DVD, depending on how big you want the files. Since size does matter (no matter what you think) I choose a mix, small size but very good video. To put it real world, the quality is better than VHS, not as good as DVD but better than digital cable/on-demand.

Audio
For me audio is by far the most important part. I can handle a few video encoding artifacts but if the audio is bad or is NOT Dolby Digital/DTS then I'm out. This was the hardest part, finding software that would keep the DD/DTS audio track in tact. Thankfully I did...

And the winner is....
Auto Gordian Knot (AutoGK). This is one excellent app. Basically what these guys have done is package up several open source projects into one major project for ripping your DVD's. While there aren't that many choices you don't really need them as it generally knows the best settings. And most importantly it can keep the original audio track in prefect quality (so I get 5.1/6.1 surround with the files). I set my output filesize to 1500 (1.5GB), choose the source, and then set the output and let it run. You can queue jobs with it so you can rip several DVD's to your hard drive then encode from there (by far the fastest method). It generally takes about 2-5 hours to encode a DVD at this high quality, but boy is it worth it. On my machines I just rip 4-5 disks to the hard drive (that takes about 1 hour, really only about 10 minutes of my time). Then I queue them up to run overnight. When I wake up I've got 4-5 new movies ripped. Did I mention I'm using 5 of the machines in my house to do this at the same time?

How do you view these?
I'm glad you asked. There are a few ways. For me I have 2 Windows Media Center Edition PC's in my home, one in my main home theatre and one in my bedroom. My main home theatre uses an HD 100" front projector and my bedroom has a 42" plasms. I do almost all my viewing through WMCE now, and generally don't use my DVR at all (soon I'll post about using Bittorrent and RSS for an internet based DVR). So I can watch these files on every TV in my house. I can also watch them on every laptop, every computer, and every cell phone I own (I have a Treo 700 and my wife has a Treo 650). So for me this is perfect. Now you're either thinking I'm crazy for having all this or that it's very cool. I'm definetly of the latter and believe that sooner than you think you'll be doing something similar too. Remember when you first heard about an iPod? MP3? Well were at that point with video I think...

Is this legal?
You tell me? I'm no lawyer but as I understand it this is not. The main issue with this is that I'm breaking the CSS copy protection on my DVD's to rip them. This is total crap. There are DVD's I OWN people. I am using them in a different way, just like I do with my CD's. It is NO DIFFERENT. I OWN this material, I paid for it so I'm gonna use it (please don't sue me though!)

Why????
Well my main goal is to see if I can, just like when I started ripping my entire CD collection. Yes it takes a lot longer (but I have far fewer DVD's than I did CD's) but I feel that it's worth it. In the end I'll have a personal on-demand home move system with almost anything I'd want to watch. In very high quality, and perfect audio. Sounds cool to me.....