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  1. Member
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    Hi

    I prefer to use my Hard Drives as the storage method to play back all my media in programs like media player & media center

    So, to that end, when I buy BluRay and DVDs I wish to rip them to my hard drives for easy access & viewing & keep the disks as back up.

    For example, I'd have all my Lost episodes in a Lost folder on my hard drive so I can select, and play at will.

    I want exact quality without 'shrinking' so no quality loss and the files muxed so audio & vid together in one file

    So, my question is How do I do this and with what programs.

    Thanks in advance for any help that will be very appreciated.
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  2. You need a decrypter, obviously, capable of removing copy protection from DVDs and BDs. But first you must decide what "container" you will rip to.

    You can rip to files, ISO image or MKV. With MKV you can extract main movie only and keep whichever audio and subtitle streams you want, along with chapter marks. MakeMKV can do this for you with no loss of quality. If you want full disc with menus, you must rip to files or ISO. I would recommend AnyDVDHD or DVDFab. (DVDFab has a free portion, DVDFabHDDecrypter. Supposedly updates for it lag somewhat behind the pay version). Either one will produce a copy on your hard drive with no quality loss.

    ISO images are convenient in that they are single files, disc images. You can "mount" an ISO on a virtual drive like VirtualCloneDrive or DaemonTools and play it as if it were a physical disc. Or you can burn the ISO to disc with ImgBurn with a single click.

    Although you didn't ask, it's generally agreed here that Arcsoft TMT is far better than PowerDVD for playing Blu-Ray discs (and rips). DVDs are no problem with most any player. MKVs can be played with the free players MPCHC and VLC, to name just two.

    Good luck and welcome to the forum.
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  3. Mod Neophyte Super Moderator redwudz's Avatar
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    You are probably aware, but most commercial DVDs are about 9GB. Commercial Blu-rays are about 30GB to 40GB, so plan on having a lot of hard drive space. A 1TB hard drive can hold about 25 Blu-ray backups. Since you have the DVDs and Blu-rays, you could just do the main movie and not the extras. That would be about 7 - 8GB or less for a DVD and about 25GB or less for a Blu-ray, depending on the running time.

    Unless they changed it, I don't think PowerDVD can play Blu-ray files from a hard drive. But TMT can.

    I convert my Blu-rays to MKV, H.264 codec and they end up at about 8GB with great quality. Double that size and the quality should be very hard to tell from the original Blu-ray. All depends on how many movies you want to rip and how much hard drive space you want to use.
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  4. Member
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    Thank you, both Fritzi93 & Redwudz, for your blazingly fast responses to my query. I hadn't expected any answer so fast.

    I am a video producer myself and I am close to completion of a project where my whole 1400 hour footage archives is being captured to hard drive. only 300 hrs to go.

    Hard drive based archiving, along with the ability to hyperlink to a file directly from a word page and open it that way, is fast becoming my mainstream and the ability to archive my entertainment media the same way has been a sought after innovation. Its clean, quick effective & eliminates the need to swap disks all the time.

    I'll give Makemkv a go and see how it rolls and post my results. I did notice that the beta version was free full functionality. Did I read that right or will I have to pay somewhere along the line, just so i know.

    I do have another question for you that hopefully will be an easy solve.

    As mentioned I will have my entire collection of footage so far on a number of WD elements external USB drives. and all 13 of them are hooked in to my comp via external ports and internal USB cards. I value having instant access to all my footage.

    However, a new problem is on the horizon, as those externals combined with my internals and OS partitions, have almost utilized all available driveletter assignments...

    So... what options do i have when they run out?. Is there a method of creating new assignments like drive 'BA', 'BB' etc.



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    Hi guys

    Installed makemkv but it crashes before rendering anything. It runs through a startup process then crashes. Same with BluRay & DVD titles.

    How can i sort this?
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  6. Well, MakeMKV is beta after all. Lots of people have used it extensively and say they've never had the slightest problem with it. Others *have* reported problems. I've only used it a few times and found it didn't handle subtitles correctly. Perhaps it was the version I was using or the specific discs I was decrypting, I dunno. Anyway, AnyDVDHD and DVDFab are reliable.

    Just a note about PowerDVD. I have v.8, although it's no longer installed, and it did play mounted BD images from hard drive. Later versions are less functional. In AnyDVDHD (and DVDFabPasskey, a very similar driver-level version of DVDFab), there is a checkbox in settings for "PowerDVD workaround". I presume you enable that and have the program running while playing a BD from hard drive in PDVD.

    There are so many ways to do this it's hard to know where to start. If it's MKVs you want, there are separate tools to create them from BD files. You can do it with a separate tool straight from disc with AnyDVDHD or DVDFabPasskey running. Or you can let DVDFab do the repackaging as it rips. I'll let others suggest a few tools. I've used HDConvertToX for this, but it's probably not the simplest procedure. I normally do disc images for my HTPC for playback with TME.

    Others will have helpful suggestions no doubt.

    Good luck.
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  7. Mod Neophyte Super Moderator redwudz's Avatar
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    However, a new problem is on the horizon, as those externals combined with my internals and OS partitions, have almost utilized all available driveletter assignments...

    So... what options do i have when they run out?. Is there a method of creating new assignments like drive 'BA', 'BB' etc.
    I'm not sure if I can exactly answer the hard drive letter problem. I have my videos on servers accessed over my gigabit LAN system and the drive letters are duplicated as I have more than 27 drives, and quite a few 'C' drives.

    But I don't have the drives mapped to any of my computers, so they don't all show on my other computers at the same time, like local drives that would be limited to the 27 drive letters available. (Actually 25 letters, as 'A' and 'B' are reserved for floppies.) I can access a couple of 'E' drives on different PCs at the same time and there are no conflicts. But if I tried to map all those drives, then there would be a conflict as I would run out of drive letters.

    You could probably test this out with your USB system by naming two drives with the same letters and see how the OS would respond. If it doesn't recognize the drive or automatically reassigns the drive a unused drive letter, as I suspect it will, you may have a problem with your present setup if you expand beyond 25 local drives. No solution I know of with MS OSs.
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  8. Member yoda313's Avatar
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    Is there anyway the poster could partition the drives to add more? Or does that not help with physically adding another drive?
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  9. If they do not have to have drive letters you can always switch to using NAS externals.

    On my setup to use them I have shortcuts such as \\feb_2011 or \\march_2011 depending on what I've named them. The problem becomes if you wanted to map them to drive letters then you are limited to C: to Z:.

    OTOH you can have as many Network attached storage (NAS) drives as you want as long as they all have different names.

    BTW you do have them backed up for when they die?
    If I'd known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself.
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  10. If they have to have drive letters then get 8Tb NAS drives and consolidate what you have in use onto them.
    If I'd known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself.
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  11. Member
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    Cheers guys

    What I'll end up doing I suspect is to leave an assignment free so I can swap in extra drives as I need them, so its not a biggie.

    Tboneit - cheers - I know nothing about NAS drives but I'll suss em out. 8 TB is,.... scary, lol

    Re backing up, yep, once all the footage is sorted into month/day folders and everything flows in time order across all the drives then I will be making copies of the drives as backups, on the theory its unlikely that two drives fail at exactly the same time.

    Re yoda's suggestion, partitioning just creates another drive needing a letter. I have two partitioned OS drives that own 7 driveletters between them & thats gonna get a rethink, lol.

    Cheers Fritzi - the makeKVM issue might be related to a powerDVD issue I have. I had powerdvd installed and it stopped recognizing blu-ray disks "the disk in drive... has an unsupported format", where it worked fine before
    I upgraded to powerdvd10 ultra - same deal. Dunno what thats about.


    DVD shrink rips the vobs from DVD files nicely and no quality loss I can determine so DVD issue is solved. Now just to sort the Blu-Ray out.


    I'll try DVD fab...
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  12. Member
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    Another issue but i'm getting there....

    Asbove DVD shrink extracts the vobs but the DVD I tried had 4 TV episodes on it but it ended up as one file, which I suspect is how it was on the DVD with llinks to beginning of each ep within main file.

    Can anyone advise me re a video splitter where i can split the large file into the 4 episodes.

    I don't want a copied file - i'm looking for a utility that will simply split the ORIGINAL 4 hr vob into 4 1 hr vobs not one that copies - ie leaves the original 4 hr file intact after creating the 4 1 hrs.

    any advice here?
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  13. Member
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    Hi again

    Re ripping

    I found DVD fab works fine except for some disks that the resulting m2ts files created on m2ts passthrough wont play.
    Using DVD fabs re-encode to m2ts works great (but the audio seems faster - in sync at beginning but after an hour is a few seconds ahead.
    Any ideas?
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  14. Mod Neophyte Super Moderator redwudz's Avatar
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    I have two partitioned OS drives that own 7 driveletters between them & thats gonna get a rethink, lol.
    Even my 2TB hard drives only have a single partition and they work fine that way. I rarely use multiple partitions.
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