DVD Ripping to HDD

[Dan Dare]

Hi All

This has probably been asked before but.......

I have just got Vista Ultimate installed and want to use the PC as a media center. I have plenty of HDD space now and have been cataloging my music, photos etc.

I want to rip my DVD collection so it can be played direct from the HDD via Windows Media Center. I have a copy of ImTOO's DVD Ripper 5 Platinum installed.

What is the best format to rip to, and what codec will I need? I want to be able to play the movies on a 50" LCD tv.

Thanks

Dan

[redwudz]

If you are just ripping the DVDs (Creating an exact copy on your hard drive) you can use the freeware DVDFab HD Decrypter. This will also give you the best quality. If you want them to take up less space, you can use DVD Shrink (Also freeware) to shrink them down from the usual 7GB to about 4GB.

If you want them smaller, try AutoGK and convert them to Xvid/Divx format. I would recommend a size of 1 - 2GB. If you want them even smaller, a H.264 or MKV format can get them to about 700MB to 1GB with about the same quality. But this takes a fast computer and a good video card to be practical.

The codec depends on what format you plan to use. Vista Ultimate should already have the MPEG2 codec installed. You may have to 'trick' Media Center into recognizing DVDs ripped to your hard drive. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/930526

It all depends on what quality you want, how much space you have on your hard drives and how much time you want to spend if you want to make the files smaller.

And welcome to our forums.

[Dan Dare]

Thanks

I have just done the dvd library thing so thats ideal for what I want. I dont want to lose too much quality so I'll leave them as .vob then.

[redwudz]

For home theater use, ripping the DVDs directly to the hard drive is probably the best and quickest way, as the quality would be the same as the original DVD. And with large hard drives available for reasonable prices, you can still get quite a few DVDs stored, even at 7GB per DVD.

If you don't need the 'extras', including subs, alternate languages, directors comments and other non-movie stuff, you can also use DVD Shrink with no compression and just choose the main movie. Then you don't have to watch the previews, warnings, and other non-movie stuff. Disney likes to put a lot of previews before the movie. This will also trim down the DVD size to about 5GB, or a bit less most times. With no quality loss.