A Journey to the darkside
For those of you who have been to my house, you know that I have over 1,000 DVD movies at my house (yes I bought them all over the years). The DVD’s take up two bookshelves in my front room, two bookshelves in my basement and there are some DVD’s in boxes. It was time to reduce clutter and make it easier to play a movie.
So I had this brilliant idea, I should get these organized and use a Media Center PC to play them. I can just rip them off the DVD’s onto a big NAS device and put all the movies into storage somewhere. Instant clutter removal.
I dove right in. I ripped apart some old machines (I always seem to have 4 or 5 old machines laying around), bought a HTPC case and built a Media Center based HTPC. After trying all the different viewing software I chose TheaterTek to be my movie viewing software. Life was …. okay.
Now it was time to start burning DVD’s to hard drive. At first I thought I would just rip my DVD’s to mpeg2 (this is the format they are stored in natively). I went to the source for these kinds of things, HTPC News, led me to cd freaks and doom 9.
This felt like a bit of the dark side here. How to get around copy protection, how to rip a movie. There are definitely people who break the law and rip movies from Blockbuster or Netflix; however, I think most of the people are like me, just trying to rip their own movies to get some space and organization back in their life.
I found the solution of choice for ripping movies was called AutoGK. I downloaded it and started trying to figure out how to use it. There are a lot of guides like this or these that help. So I went through them and tried to create my first rip… and my second rip… and my third rip…
The rips took about 4-8 hours each and the quality was…. less than DVD. Audio Synch problems, subtitle problems.. just lots of pain. While I was sitting there watching another rip in progress, my mind wandered and I did some math. In round numbers, I have 1000 DVD’s if they take on average 6 hours each, I should be able to get this done in about 3 years… I killed the rip.
Well, thats not going to work. So I started looking for a new solution, after all, I cant be the only person trying to do this. It was about this time that I ran into the MyMovies plugin for Media Center.
MyMovies creates a catalog of your movies and hooks right into media center. It starts TheaterTek and plays the video in DVD format. Holy smokes this could work. I can rip a DVD to hard drive in ISO folder format in about 20 minutes per DVD. To my surprise, it did work just like it was supposed to. Life was okay again.
After I ripped about fifty movies, I realized that adding movies to MyMovies sucks, it’s time consuming. You have to go and find or scan covers and enter a whole bunch of information. So I found DVD Profiler, It can download covers and profile data and then export to MyMovies. Now, remember, I am making my life easier.
DVD Profiler is pretty good, the user interface sucks and its a bit clunky, but you just type in your bar code and add the movie. It really is that easy. Export to xml and import to MyMovies and like “magic” the movies show up in Media Center. Then I started seeing the flaws in MyMovies, it does not sort correctly the trailers don’t work etc… Hard to complain when it’s free but it does make the experience suck a bit.
Then I thought, wait a minute, I write code, I could make a plugin for media center myself and have it hook into into DVD Profiler. I looked into this, I would have to write the code in .NET 1.0 and DVD Profiler does not have an API, forget that.
I decided I will just have to live with this until the software in this industry gets better. I have to say its all been very educational, but what a pain the backside. This is not easy, you have to either be a geek or really driven to pull this off. If Microsoft wants to know why Media Center is not getting that big of a penetration this is why. It’s just too damn hard for a normal person to put together.
I started this in October of 2005 and I probably have well over 200 hours into figuring this out. I know way more about video codecs and DVD structure than I ever wanted to know. I have to say, the software in the market segment…. sucks. I am not trying to insult anybody but it’s a bunch of clunky command line driven stuff. There are no API’s its all really slow and complex to use. The good news is, most of it is free and open source. Many people have told me to build a linux box or buy a mac and use Quicktime etc… My point is this, the OS with the largest penetration should have some decent software for this by now.
Here is what I want, put my DVD in my DVD drive. Click a couple of buttons and rip it to mpg2 in under 30 minutes. Its already stored in mpg2 what the heck else has to be done? Overlay the subtitles? Look at the Fairuse Wizard, it has a decent user interface and you don’t have to be a geek to use it. But it has to have the disk in an ISO file or on the DVD drive and then it will copy it to the machine for you. It also wont output mpg2, it has to do a transcode so it takes hours per DVD.
For now, I will keep chugging forward on burning my DVD’s to the NAS and live with the flaws of MyMovies and Media Center. It really is good when it’s all working together. I am down to my HTPC and Amp in my living room. I am hoping to get rid of the Amp soon but I just got an XBOX 360 (Thanks Matt) for Christmas and thats going to be whole new adventure into the dark side.