[mythtv-users] ripping dvds of tv series (sopranos, alias, etc)

Peter Buelow pete at putzin.net
Fri Dec 31 06:45:41 UTC 2004


Mark Elrod wrote:

>Hey all,
>
>I am once again looking at finally ripping all my dvds to hdd and was
>wondering what solutions people were using for episodic dvds. I am
>seriously considering just doing iso's so that I keep the dvd menus
>but it would be nice to save all the space/$$ by using divx to rip
>them down... problem is how do you organize them?
>
>Open to suggestions!
>
>Mark
>  
>
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>
I would like to do the same thing, ripping them down isn't too big a 
deal, but right now, I would like to buy a second HDD to do this with 
(have some 300 Gig of DVD episodes to rip). Unfortunately, MythDVD 
doesn't do seperate partitions, so you can't mount a new drive to store 
them at this point, although I submit that would be nice.

I have found however, that you can just rip the episodes without the 
menus. Myth does a good enough job of managing videos that you don't 
need to have the DVD menu's as well (be smart with the names is all), 
and it should save you (just guessing here, but it's probably not too 
far off for most) roughly 1Gig per DVD if you leave the extra stuff out. 
For instance, I just want all of my episodes of Futurama, the Simpsons, 
Seinfeld, etc... in episode order so that I can just pull them up 
whenever, which Myth does wonderfully well, but I don't really have the 
space to do this just yet. I'm getting close to trying to hack Myth to 
look in multiple locations for videos (right now two possible 
directories would be nice) so that I can rip DVD's to one place, store 
my recorded shows in another, and these can both be on seperate physical 
disks.

Also, you don't lose anything by transcoding them down to Mpeg4 really, 
unless you're a maven and have a huge hi-def TV that points out flaws in 
any stream. Basically, those two things will save you up to 50% of the 
space you may have used going full ISO. Myth really is good about 
handling the cataloging and playback if you ask me, so take advantage 
and don't throw away space on stuff that you might now care about. Up to 
you though on that one.

Can anyone offer a suggestion as to a way to combine two seperate drives 
to manage my space? No raid, the machine is running and the first video 
drive is being used for recordings.  I just want to add one without a 
significant extra amount of effort.

-Pete


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