I would like to setup a Media Server and store all my DVDs on a giant hard drive.   Do you know of any software that I can use to RIP the DVDs to my hard drive? I don't have the media server built yet.  Can I just use something like a Dlink Media Center to play them?   My ultimate goal would be to sit down at the TV and ba able to access my entire DVD collection from a remote.  Any suggestions???

 

    QMAN

Access my entire DVD collection from a remote.
My Movies

My Movies for Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition is the ultimate movie collection management and playback tool. With My Movies you are able to index your movies with automatically downloaded data from the internet, and then browse movies, actors, directors and much more. You can share your movie database to multiple clients, and configure each client to its own parental control limitation, and require pin # to view the full collection.
at http://www.mymovies.name/

There are several tools you can use to rip the DVD's.  The most current versions of My Movies (above) will make a 1:1 copy of the DVD (keeping protection) and then you can run software like AnyDVD or DVD43 on the machine to remove the protection for playback on-the-fly.

Other than that, there are tools like DVD Shrink and DVD Decrypter to rip the DVD's w/ removing protection.  Then if wanted to can use a tool like AutoGK or Dr. DivX (along with several others) to convert the rips to XviD or DivX.  Using DivX or XviD will give you very good quality at file sizes around 1.5GB per movie.  Most DVD's average around 4-5GB so you can do the math there on file storage savings.

Best thing I have found is Clone DVD by slysoft. Works perfectly and quickly.

I just started ripping my DVDs to the hard drive using DVDShrink.  I then go into MyMovies/Manage Collection and setup the DVD I just ripped.  Is this the correct process?

Also, will the format that DVDShrink rips to be playable on an xbox 360 extender?

Thanks!

- Miami

depends, how did it you rip it? 

you may want to check out a program called transcode360, sorry I dont have a link, never played with it myself but it seems to live encode anything the 360 can't show by default to somethign it can.  Not sure if it integrates into my movies though.

The defaults I have selected with DVDShrink are:

Remove macrovision protection

Remove P-UOPS (Prohibited user operations)

Remove layer break

Split VOB files into 1gb size chunks (Recomneded)

When creating the backup, I select to create a video and audio_ts directory.

Thanks for the tip on transcode.

-Miami