DVD Archiving

I was recently asked about what a good setup for ripping and watching DVDs without having to handle the DVDs.  I'll cover how I do it, and some of the other options for how it could be done.

So, starting at the "top", you need something to watch on, eh?  For simplicity's sake, a TV that has HDMI inputs is best.  Of course you can make it work lots of different ways, but HDMI is the easiest by a ways.  We got a Proscan 47" LCD 1080p 240Hz HDTV (47LC55S240V87) a year and a half ago and we've been thrilled with it.  The company that makes it appears to have gone out of business, but for getting video from the receiver to a display, it does an excellent job.

Next, you may or may not choose to have an A/V Receiver.  If you intend to listen to surround sound, you'll need one.  We have an aging Harman/Kardon AVR-254.  This provides on of the features that I believe my wife likes best - having as few cables as possible going to the TV.  We can connect our Wii, our VCR and our home theater PC (and several more components if we had them) to it, and run one simple HDMI cable from it to the TV.  It is also capable of decoding the fancy new HD audio that comes on Blu-ray disks.

The next component one needs to consider for this setup is something that can play the ripped disks.  There are lots of different boxes that will do this, but I prefer to stick to what I know: home theater PCs (HTPCs). Right now I'm using a Zotac Zbox (http://www.zotacusa.com/zbox-ad02.html) that I put 8GB of RAM and a 60GB SSD.  It runs Windows 7 Ultimate, which comes with Windows Media Center (WMC).  We rather like the WMC front-end.

Next you need a place to store the ripped DVDs.  Depending on your choice of HTPC, you might just store them there.  You also can use an external hard drive.  We decided to go with a server in our basement.  It's fairly old hardware, but it doesn't take much to store files.

Finally, you need a way to rip the DVDs.  This too can be done on your HTPC if you have an optical drive on it (I don't), but can be done on any PC that has access to where you store your ripped DVDs.  There are several tools out there to do this, and some are even free.  A great free one that I've used is DVDFab DVD/HD Decrypter (http://www.dvdfab.com/hd-decrypter.htm).  Currently I'm doing a trial of AnyDVD HD (http://www.slysoft.com/en/anydvdhd.html).

Having used this setup for quite some time now, I'm pretty happy with it.  The one thing I would change is that I'd put an optical drive in the HTPC.  Every time we rent a move, or borrow one from a friend, we end up having to rip it in order to watch it.

There are additional considerations you need to make if you'd like to rip Blu-rays as well as DVDs.  The space required for a blu-ray (12-50GB) is considerably larger than a DVD (4-8GB), so your storage won't go nearly as far.  Software that rips DVDs doesn't always also rip blu-rays.  Finally, you need additional software on the HTPC in order to play blu-rays.  I use Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 5 (http://www.arcsoft.com/totalmedia-theatre/).  If you buy a blu-ray drive, usually it comes with software you can use for this.

This setup comes after about 10 years of messing around, so I know it's what works best for me and my family.  I'm sure every home is different.  The cost of the whole system is significant, but it's stuff we've acquired over years.  Some might find the prospect of a running a file server intimidating.

I'd love to hear in the comments what works for you.