DVD Project

A few weeks ago, I decided to tackle a huge project -- getting rid of the big pile of DVDs that took up two bookshelves in our entertainment room.

The process of converting all of the DVDs into files to be stored on the file server didn't seem like it would be difficult, just time consuming. It turned out to be somewhat expensive, too.

I'm using three of the PCs we have in the house -- my Windows server, a Mac Mini, and my MacBook Pro laptop -- to do the conversion from DVD to computer files. Handbrake is a cross-platform app that can run on all of the machines to do the heavy lifting.

All three machines are roughly the same speed, so ripping is done at about real-time on all of them. So, a 30-minute TV episode converts into a file in about 30 minutes.

The obvious problem is that I'm trying to maintain a good deal of quality in the video that's output. Since my main intention is to be able to easily view this stuff on the big screen, I'm converting everything to PS3 compatible video. That way, we fire up the PS3, browse for what we want to watch, and see it on the 46" LCD.

I'm down to the last "15 feet" of shelf space to be converted, all television series (I buy ALOT of TV on DVD).

I was also down to my last few gig of drive space on the file server. So, I got 4 new 1TB drives for the file server. They arrived on Friday morning and I've spent all weekend swapping them in, allow them to synchronize, then swapping in the next drive.

All told, I've got nearly 48 hours invested in swapping in the new drives. When I'm finally done (it's saying just a few minutes more on the last drive now), I'll have roughly 1500GB of free space to work with. Let's hope that's enough!

For the curious, the time to sync the drives was really strange:

Drive 1: 25 hours
Drive 2: 8 hours
Drive 3: 7 hours
Drive 4: 6 hours