HTPC ...playing episodes from DVD images

[lordhutt]

Ok, I doubt this is possible but....

Let's say I take a tv series worth of DVD's and burn them to my hard drive for a HTPC.
Lets say it's the Simpsons. This is a lot of DVD's and over 400 episodes and about 40 or so discs (currently).

I would like to have an HTML file I could browse through with a complete list and description of each episode...maybe a pic or 2 from the episode. That is the easy part.

Is there a way to make a file (that I could click on a link to in the browser) that would go to the proper DVD image and play that particular episode?...with or without the option of say audio commentary etc.?
I know I can rip all of the episodes individually and do it that way but was wondering if something like this could be done.

I already have every episode (and other tv series as well) in DivX form but would rather have the better quality with the straight uncompressed dvd rips. The monster hard drives available today makes space not an issue.

I have ripped plenty of DVD's with programs like DVD Decryptor but never episodic dvd's. If what I ask is not possible what would be the best/easiest route to take to rip all of my tv series dvd's into individual episode files without compression.

Thanks.

[powerpc123]

I just rip the entire Disc to an iso and Mediaportal (daemontools) mounts it automatically and I just go with the original menu

As for your HTML accessing the insides of an ISO, IDK.

As for ripping individual episodes to their own files, that the easy part:

Insert DVD, Launch DVDDecrypter
Go to the Mode menu and select IFO mode. This will give you access to two new tabs; Input & Stream Processing.

Go to the Tools menu, select Settings, go to the IFO tab, then under Options, change File Splitting to None and press OK.

Go to the main screen and find the VTS your movie is in. That is further broke down into PGC1, PGC2. Just highlight the one you want to rip - they're in the same order as they are on the DVD.

Optionally, click the Stream Processing tab. Check the "Enable Stream Processing" box at the top. Next, select only the audio you want included.

[Xylob the Destroyer]

Or you can use DVDShrink to rip each individial episode as it's own ISO.

[jman98]

Do note that for very badly authored DVDs, the above methods will not work. This rarely happens, but it is possible. I've seen a DVD where multiple episodes were put in the same VOB and could not be split up. The entire VOB had to be ripped and then edited by hand to split it up into separate pieces. Even ripping by IFO could not correctly extract the individual episodes. Again, this is rare and not likely to happen with The Simpsons, but it is possible.

Good for you, lordhutt, for correctly realizing that hard drives are relatively cheap. We get a lot of posts from people who seem to not know this and are squeezing the hell out of their videos to save space when they could just buy bigger hard drives and not have to compress anything.

[Krispy Kritter]

Just a thought, but you could create high quality divx/xvid files, which eliminates the need to use orignals iso's for "better quality". Animated shows/cartoons handle conversion to avi very well and The Simpsons aren't the highest quality video anyway. It will also still take up much less HDD space, which regardless of cost, gets eaten up pretty quickly when you start using it for video storage.

[rallynavvie]

I don't think he was asking how to make the images but rather how to access them from something like Media Center.

There is a "plug-in" for Media Center (2005 only I think, but maybe he made a Vista version if you need) called MyMovies. My version mounts the ISOs using DaemonTools from within MCE. You do have to assign each ISO information from the app outside MCE before each image will be recognized within MCE but it doesn't take long. It also pulls all the movie info on the DVD from IMDB or similar so that you can reference all that within MCE.

I use it in my massive HTPC environment at my cabin. I have TBs of hard drive space on a storage array with ripped ISOs of most of my movie collection so that I don't have to lug the discs back and forth between my home and cabin.

[lordhutt]

What I am mainly interested in is a way to browse such a massive amount of videos.

I have my HTPC that I built about 5 months ago and at the moment am just running XP and running vids and movies from Windows Explorer. Media Player Classic for XviD and VLC Player for image files.

Movies are not bad...just click the image file and it runs (all extras stripped so no messing with menu or any of that crap.)
When it comes to series like the Simpsons or Family Guy I am just trying to figure out the easiest way to navigate through the files.
That is why I was thinking of the HTML idea to have a description of each episode in case I want to search for a particular one.

Aren't there some good media jukebox programs out there that can do this? I realize I will probably have to rip the individual eps though as none of the software will just pull and episode from a DVD.

I am starting to confuse myself here!!! What do you use for your HTPC to navigate DivX, Image files, etc.?

However I browse through them I definitely want there to be a description and even pics of each show. Not so important for a movie since if it is on your hdd then you should know what it is about. But I have about 5 tv series and this can add up to over 1000 files...trying to find what you want without a description would be impossible.

Anyway...I'm just going on and on here....any more suggestions.
Thanks for the previous replies.

[Xylob the Destroyer]

...What do you use for your HTPC to navigate DivX, Image files, etc.?....

I'm not fancy.
I have image files saved in folders labled as the title of the disc. When I want to watch one I mount it in Daemon tools and run it from MPC.
I don't do divx, avi, etc with the exception of some older stuff that's not available on DVD like some of the Japanese Transformers series or the later seasons of Gargoyles. For that stuff, I just use MediaPlayer (9 or 10 I think -- I hate 11) and have added the files to my library.