Discs to Digital - How?

[JoeDeM]

Maybe I'm not as dedicated as others, but unless you have a smallish collection, I wouldn't bother, or only do a subset of your most watched disc's. It's very time consuming taking anywhere from 30min to 1.5 hours on my system, so needless to say I haven't gotten very far.

[handcraftedbits]

Originally Posted by JoeDeM

Maybe I'm not as dedicated as others, but unless you have a smallish collection, I wouldn't bother, or only do a subset of your most watched disc's. It's very time consuming taking anywhere from 30min to 1.5 hours on my system, so needless to say I haven't gotten very far.

I have about 350 movies and a decent number of TV shows. It did take quite a while -- at first. But once you've got everything done, the trick is to rip your movies as soon as you get them. Doesn't really take long to stay on top of it.

[Vilya]

Originally Posted by handcraftedbits

If you have a sensibly-sized collection, it's not crazy expensive to buy all the disks you need. Personally I tend to wonder what people with 3K+ discs are thinking, they probably haven't watched every movie they own, and if they have, there's probably a significant chunk that aren't really "favorite movies" that are worth keeping around.

As someone with over 3K titles, I can comment to this from my pov at least.

I have been collecting movie since the 1980s, so I might have acquired more than some who have been doing so over a smaller time frame. Many of these have been bought several times with each format improvement, but even with each successive format, some titles, or versions of them, gets left behind.

I am in my sixth decade of watching movies, so my personal connection to some of them might run deeper than someone younger as quite a few of these I saw at the theater when they were new. Now, I can revisit them whenever I choose. It's my time machine in a way to a past that I knew first hand.

I have not watched every movie that I own, but I have watched far more than I have not. Also, I'm not quite dead yet, so hopefully I still have time to get a few more viewed.

Not every film I own is a "favorite" by any means, but most are quite enjoyable under varying circumstances. There are very few turkeys among the eagles in my collection as far as I am concerned. Owning a wide variety allows me to watch whatever I am in the mood for and to indulge my spontaneous whims.

I also own a substantial number of films because I think that they are important and because I want to study something about them, even if they do not normally fall within my favorite genres or styles. I want to see if I can appreciate what others are seeing or not. I have discovered many great movies this way.

I also keep films around that I believe will appeal to the people that visit me, such as family and friends. I kinda follow the old adage that I would rather have what I don't "need" than to "need" what I don't have.

They take up some space, but I have the space for them. They are neatly arranged alphabetically by title within each format. I enjoy what I am doing and that is the ultimate reason behind why I do what I do.

[casey76]

I've got a little over 600 movies ripped, around 1/2 of my collection. I've taken the approach of ripping a movie when I decide I want to watch it rather than ripping everything. I have to somewhat schedule what I want to watch if it's something I haven't ripped yet, but that's not difficult. It only takes about 30 minutes to rip a movie so I can set one to rip before I go to bed, go to work, while reading a book, having dinner, etc.

[shinobipopcorn]

If you don't care about cost or rights, there's always the Vudu method. 2 bucks a title, 100 titles max per year, no Disney titles.

[bigshot]

My archive is Mac based, and we use Drobo disk arrays for our storage. They have five disks for three disks of storage, offering two simultaneous hard drive failures without problems, and they have the option of solid state drives as caches to speed things up a bit. Some models will do NAS streaming, some use lightning port or USB 3.

[hanshotfirst1138]

If you rip your own movie to a hard drive, would anyone in the legal system even know or care?

[fodderwing]

I have joined this forum after nearly 10 years of regular lurking... the OP of this thread has asked something that's been on my mind for a long time now.

I have 2.5K discs, double stacked in bookcases, and I'm running out of room - probably a familiar problem to many here.

If I could, I'd start recording them onto a series of hard-drives, or set up a NAS (in 30 years of computing, I've had 3 hard-drives go bad on me). Trouble is I haven't a clue how to start, or what the preferred interface platform should be (not a MAC person).

The fear in the back of my mind is that I go ahead and invest the time/money to set this up, only for technology to overtake my efforts rendering it as junk before I've finished the project (I worked my way through to the end of the DOS6 manual, just as WIN95 arrived).

I'm aware that this is a tightrope subject in this forum - is there a "Dummies Guide" anyone could recommend?

[handcraftedbits]

Originally Posted by hanshotfirst1138

If you rip your own movie to a hard drive, would anyone in the legal system even know or care?

Not unless you were sharing it online.

Originally Posted by fodderwing

I'm aware that this is a tightrope subject in this forum - is there a "Dummies Guide" anyone could recommend?

Unfortunately there’s only really information scattered around of various quality. I’d love to write a treatise on the subject here but I’m afraid it would get removed, making the whole exercise pointless.

[andjar01]

I used to think those 10-20 GB blu-ray rips look great. Not anymore ...not since i started collecting blurays and using 4K(+ 4k upscaling) displaying devices only.
I'd still like to do that for big tv series with a lesser cinematic quality...say X-Files or the older Star Trek series...but other than that...

[Spotty]

For data storage you will need a NAS. That is a box of hard drives that you can access from your computer and/or TV across your network.

The two big consumer NAS companies are QNAP and Synology. Just go to the Synology website and look at their products. They explain what they can do for you pretty well.

You shouldn’t have to worry about the tech. going out of date, since once your movies are digital data, you can always convert the video to a different format in the future.

As for how to convert your discs to digital data on a hard drive...there are many guides for that out there on the internet.

The big thing to remember is that if you invest a lot of time/money into a personal digitial archive, keep a duplicate copy somewhere offsite. This effectively doubles the hardware cost.....but since hard drives will fail sometime.....it is the only practical thing to do.

[koberulz]

RAID will handle hard drive failure just fine. Offsite backups are really only necessary in case of a fire/flood/etc.

[Spotty]

Originally Posted by koberulz

RAID will handle hard drive failure just fine. Offsite backups are really only necessary in case of a fire/flood/etc.

Fair enough, it doesn’t have to be offsite. But RAID is not a backup solution. It is something that helps minimize downtime where downtime is unacceptable.

Specifically, most consumer NAS devices have a higher failure rate than modern hard drives, so chances of the RAID system getting damaged or corrupted are pretty high. Failure also can occure by things like power surges, physical damage, liquid spills etc.

I still think having a separate system is the only true backup solution.

Also, when setting up my system, I found that the cost of having two completely redundant systems not in RAID was only about 30% more for me than using a single system in RAID 5. Given the cost difference, it just seemed a better solution. To me anyway.

[slimdude]

It would be less complicated and work, if you just subscribe to a streaming service.

[andjar01]

Too early for me. When we'll have 200TB hard drives on the market for under 100$ ,it might be worth backing up my collection without any recompreedion.

[bigshot]

Originally Posted by Spotty

The big thing to remember is that if you invest a lot of time/money into a personal digitial archive, keep a duplicate copy somewhere offsite. This effectively doubles the hardware cost.

Not necessarily... A dock and a batch of bare SATA drives is a lot less costly than archiving a whole array with redundant drives. You just buy whatever size of SATA drive that is cheapest per gig at the time and fill it and pop it back in the box and send it out to storage. That can cost almost half what the main RAID array costs.

If you are going to invest in a big server, you need both a RAID and offsite backup. I've been maintaining 200TB for nearly a decade now, and the RAID is very dependable. But there were two occasions where my backup was necessary to restore corrupted data, and I lost a whole 2TB volume once. It's good, but it isn't foolproof. (knock on wood)

Originally Posted by slimdude

It would be less complicated and work, if you just subscribe to a streaming service.

I have a lot of imported discs with films that aren't available in the US on disc, much less on streaming. Streaming is great for mainstream movies though.

The biggest advantage for people filling an array with movies is the ability to use apps like Kodi and Plex, which scrapes the data on your movies and creates a very sophisticated user interface that sorts and provides info on actors, directors, synopsis, trailers and even theme songs of TV shows.

[koberulz]

Yeah, if I find a streaming service with my home VHS recordings on it I'm not quite sure how I'd feel.

I'm not sure I understand your first paragraph, bigshot?

[slimdude]

Originally Posted by bigshot

I have a lot of imported discs with films that aren't available in the US on disc, much less on streaming. Streaming is great for mainstream movies though.

Enable to transfer movies into a digital format for personal or commerical use, is a piracy issue, also a coprighted infringement, which is forbidden to be discussed on the forum.

[handcraftedbits]

Originally Posted by slimdude

It would be less complicated and work, if you just subscribe to a streaming service.

Yes and no. The problem with streaming services is that you'll need multiple service subscriptions to get a library equivalent to what you have on disc. And that assumes those services will have all the movies you want, which they won't. Or if they do, they won't have them forever.

So OK, maybe you just buy digital copies on your favorite service? Again, that's assuming that said service has all the movies you want, which they probably don't. But that's OK, you can buy them on some other service.

At the end of the day, what you're stuck with is:

* Having to subscribe to multiple services and/or purchase all your movies again on one or more services.
* Having your collection scattered among one or more subscription or purchase services.
* Worse quality.

It's definitely not cheap and it definitely takes time to set up a NAS+Plex combo, but it's absolutely awesome when you have it set up.

[Spotty]

Originally Posted by bigshot

Not necessarily... A dock and a batch of bare SATA drives is a lot less costly than archiving a whole array with redundant drives. You just buy whatever size of SATA drive that is cheapest per gig at the time and fill it and pop it back in the box and send it out to storage. That can cost almost half what the main RAID array costs.

Yup, that is exactly what I do! I think that qualifies as “keep a duplicate copy somewhere”

I don’t keep my main NAS in a RAID, since I have the data backed up off the NAS. Hence for me it was double the cost.