Compress DVD iso while retaining playback

[jungle5150]

I've just realized that it's the simplest thing in the world to make a DVD iso backup on your hard drive.

dd if=/dev/cdrom of=dvd-backup.iso

i tested it, and I can mount the iso and play it like a dvd

sudo mount -o loop dvd-backup.iso /mnt/iso
xine dvd://mnt/iso

So I'm thinking that I could rip all my movies to a media center computer with HDMI out and just watch them from there. Maybe even get a nice pretty ui. The only drawback is that i'll need a lot of hard drive space for all my movies. So then I thought about a squashfs-like system, except one that's dynamic. I guess I could compress each file, but I'm not sure if I would be able to play them.

Does anyone know how to do this?

jungle

[guns1inger]

Most compression schemes gain you very little when compressing already compressed audio or video files. As DVD is already heavily compressed, you are unlikely to make more than minimal space gains.

For serious space gains your options are DCT recompression/re-encoding, which only works down to point before serious artifacts appear, or encoding to an alternate format, such as H264, which has far more efficient compression than mpeg-2. of course, this would mean foregoing menus etc.

[jungle5150]

yeah i should have realized that to begin with. i just spent a really long time squashfs-ing the mounted dvd only to gain about 2% of space. I guess there's no alternative than to just get a really big drive.

I could fit about 200 movies on 1TB. Hmmm, maybe i just won't worry about it right now.