DVDs to WD Elements HD storage

[gentleenforcer]

Hello forum people!

 

I am not real good on computers so bear with me.My goal is to live in Thailand sometime in the future and I have 300 to 400 DVDs of movies,football games,music and TV shows.I want to get all these stored on a few WD HDD(1.5T or bigger) and just be able to use a USB cable to plug into the TV and HDD and watch the content.

My questions are...is this possible,what do I need apart from the portable HDD DVD burner and computer.And how do I do it?Is there any techno problems that I might encounter.

 

I have a lot of time on my hands as I have just been made redundant from my job,so time is not an issue.

 

Any replies most welcome...am I wasting my time doing this?

[Spellforce]

- Download & install this free program: http://www.burnaware.com/ => create image files .iso from you DVD's and transfer those files to your external USB hard drive

- I bought this media player in Tukcom last year: "ASUS OPlay Air HDP-R3" (3.400 bahts), it can play EVERYTHING from an USB hard drive in full HD !

 

[xerive]

you would probably be better off making them divx files. A typical dvd is 4.6gig - typical divx file even with good compression and quality is 1.0gig

[gentleenforcer]

Many thanks for the replies.

 

[Woofiee]

One thing: The wrapper is divx, but the encoding format internally makes a big difference. DIVx isn't so great for videos with multiple audio tracks and adding subtitles and art, plus the encoder is not as efficient/good as modern MPEG4 formats. Choose an container that can support advanced MPEG4 formats, like MKV or M4V.

 

What I do is rip the disks down to full disk images, then use the free Handbrake app (Win/Mac) to rip out the main movie and eliminate the extras. I can knock a 7GB DVD of fluff down to 1.5GB of high-quality movie. Handbrake also allows batching, so I can take a multi-disk TV series and tell it to rip out and process all the shows without any further interaction... just set it up and let it rip-and-spit overnight.

 

I'm on a Mac so I then add subtitles and artwork with the free Subler app; it even allows you to remux a video from MKV to M4V or MP4 without having to transcode. I'm not sure if there's anything like this though for Windows.

[nrvous]

Why wouldn't you just bring the dvd's with you and just get cheap dvd player here? I wouldn't bother burning most of your disks. I learn about bittorrent, and your applicable laws, and just find the stuff on the internet that you have on your dvd. Probably 90% is already out there.

 

Otherwise....

 

You have a lot of options:

Have a PC or a laptop with a DVI or HDMI output and play your movies from your computer (install them in the computer or get a drive caddy that plugs into USB on your computer.

 

Have a TV that will play the format/codec in which your video's are compressed and plug them into the TV via a built-in USB. Obviously not all TV's do this.

 

Do the DVD player deal that some guy mentioned.

 

Buy a popcornhour (popcornhour.com) type box (can get them in Thailand). There are other types out there. Get a 3TB drive and store everything inside and plug the PH box into your TV. Advantage, it comes with a remote.

 

What do I do?

I have a computer... I use a bittorrent client to find whatever I need and I have RSS feeds from private tracker sites that allow the automated and otherwise hands off download of most of the new things I want. I have multiple 3tb drives plugged into my computer and I SHARED them on my local network. I have a popcornhour box that can see the network share and is pluged into my tv. I come home, turn on my tv and PH (think of the Popcorn hour box as a DVD jukebox but there are no dvd's just video files from my computer hard drive), and then I look at the new stuff in the list and choose what I want to watch. BAM!. Sure, this may seem complex at first but each step is doable and easy with a little bit of knowledge.

 

The advantages for me? I can play over 4.6gb video files (dvd's are only 4.6, obviously bluray burnables hold more but thats a serious expense), most usb flash drives are FAT32 and can't hold large files no matter the size (formatting to ntfs will resolve this but possibley make it less compatible with some of your other stuff and many of the DVD players with USB ports cannot read NTFS). Since I setup the RSS feed (litteraly like 5 minutes of checking what types of files and putting in text filters for the names of the items I want), I just come home and see what is new. No scouring the internet for most of my tv time, no burning dvd's, no copying to USB stick, no extra overhead on my PC (if I were playing the movie on the PC)