Dvd backup to Harddrive

[road8514]

I have looked over the internet for a bit with no luck so I decided to come here to see if I could get some help!
Here is the idea!
I want to be able to back up all my dvds to an external hard drive. this is the easy part.
I then want to be able to load a program to the hard drive were I can connect the hd to the tv and be able to watch the movies. I would like to be able to categarize the dvds by genre, rating ect. I want to have a menu to be able to choose or look up like ondemand has?
How do I do this is there a progam out there to download or buy?
Also on a side note how many movie will a 500g hd hold?
thanks
for the help

[guns1inger]

You are looking for something like TVersity or XBMC. However this will only work if you connect a PC to your TV and then connect the HDD to your PC. if you are connecting a HDD directly to your TV then your TV has to support direct connection of a HDD - few do - and you will be restricted to whatever menu your TV presents.

A DVD contains, usually, between 4 GB and 8.5 GB of data. If you rip to movie only and skip all the extras you can save some. Taking 5 GB as an average, you will get approx 100 discs to your HDD, give or take a few.

[hardy]

1. DVDfab
2. AnyDVD + CloneDVD

[Cazz]

well the easy way is to use a little old laptop with XBMC or maybe mediaportal. Maybe have all the movie in a laptop instead of external hard drive.
But the laptop have to have S-video or composit if not you TV can handle VGA.

I have see alot of external Hard drive that even work as a mediaplayer but the categarize and that is not so much you can do then.

[hardy]

ScreenPlay - hard drive & media player, plug it directly into your tv and it's ready to go

[road8514]

has anyone used this screenplay Idea? What did you think? how does the catigorising work? do you just put them in folders or something? How would I "tag" a movie in two differnt folders say comedy and pg-13 with out saving it in both?

[hardy]

ScreenPlay is a hard drive with a built-in media player. Simply go to the folder and open. Then it starts playing the movie, easy as that.