Is there a machine that converts multiple DVD's to mpg's simultaneously?

[tennis nut]

Let's say you had a lot of noncopyrighted DVD's to convert to mpg4's so you could post them online. Maybe you're a home-movie buff, you're married to a starlet, and have lots of porn to share with the world. Whatever. Is there a machine that will convert many DVD's at once or does someone have to baby-sit a computer to do it one DVD at a time?

Thanks.

[yoda313]

If you mean rip and convert from a dvd drive simultaneously no not really.

Though you could have a tower with two or more dvd drives and run programs that rip and convert simultaneously.

However I think your better bet would be to take some time and do the ripping all during one session. Then setup batch programs to do the conversions of the ripped video off the harddrive.

You would need at least a dual core pc to do this with any speed in mind. You can obviously rip and encode on a single core but the more cores you have the faster you can go.

I'm sure others here can give you specifics and pitfalls to watch out for.

But basically no there isn't a dedicated unit you can buy off the shelf to pop in dvds and spit out mpgs to harddrives or flash drives that I know of. You'll have to use a dedicated computer for that. (you could do other stuff like word processing and web surfing on it but if its not super fast you'll slow down your encoding while doing other stuff on the same computer - all things being equal).

[tennis nut]

That's good info and pretty much what I suspected. Thanks.

[yoda313]

That's good info and pretty much what I suspected. Thanks.

Sure thing.

However I am not as experienced in batch jobs as some other more veteran users on this website.

They may have a more sophisticated system they could detail for you. This is kind of just off the top of my head reasoning to get you started.

Maybe somebody will drop in and post a suggestion with more detail and specifics. Good luck.

Of course if you are strictly dealing with dvds its cheap to get a lot of dvd drives and add to a tower unit. Just make sure you have a pretty powerful power supply if you go that route. And I'm not sure what the reliability rate is for multiple simultaneous ripping jobs.

If you did do that I would imagine it should be to independent harddrives so it wouldn't crash as easily. Again this is generic information you'd have to dig for specifics on multiple dvd ripping setups.

Batch software for reencoding is readily available and more or less straightforward. (and probably should be done post ripping to reduce wear and tear on the dvd drives and probably reduce fragmentation of your harddrives - again speculation but educated speculation - at least I hope it is )