A DVD Jukebox Without the DVDs?

Malphaedrius asks: "I'm moving into a friends house with limited storage space and small children with curious fingers. I have decided to make a DVR running Linux and MythTV for two reasons. First, I want a DVR (who doesn't). Second, I want to take our collaborative DVD collections and get them out of the living room, away from grabbing hands. The question, after such a long declaration of intent, is can one rip a DVD and compress it without losing the special features and menus? I don't mind losing them but it would be nice to not have to dig out the discs if I want to listen to the director's commentary. Granted special features and multiple tracks will greatly increase the storage space needed and may be a bad idea in retrospect, but it would be nice to have the option. Has anyone built anything remotely similar to this? If so, how well has it worked?"

Comments

Yes

[NickDngr]

Yes, you can.

Re:Never Done this but ...

[oever]

No need for decompressing the image first. Just mount the compressed image with cloop.

try dvd shrink

[nri]

Compress movies with http://www.dvdshrink.org/what.html

Re:try dvd shrink

[gvc]

DVD Shrink is a free Windows program that (mostly) works under wine with a little bit of effort.

It lets you delete or retain menus and components, and do (lossy) compression without transcoding.

Re:try dvd shrink

[Anonymous Coward]

A while back I decided it was time to make backups of my DVD collection so that when my kid wants to watch Pooh, I don't have to worry about him killing the original disc. I have about 40 or so kids discs. My desktop has a 160GB data drive in it, and I figured, cool, good to go. I loaded up dvd shrink and NERO (which enabled DVD Shrink to also burn. Set it and forget it til its done) and set off. I did not bother to delete the discs as I was backing them up, figured I would deal with it when I ran out of space. When I was done backing up all the discs, I had a huge number of DVDs sitting on this single hard drive, and I thought to myself that perhaps I should just transfer this drive, and a few others like it, into a box to hook up to the TV and be good to go. Still have not decided.

DVD shrink is perfect for this, and makes it worth having a small windows partition just to use this one program (it is currently no longer being developed, and does not handle the ARCOSS copy protection scheme, so you will need a copy of the now discontinued dvd decrypter for the rare disc, or run DVD43 in the background while shrinking as a workaround for ARCOSS discs.)

If you are just doing this for the kids, and its only cartoons or so, then you can save even more space by dropping the bitrate even a bit lower, make a whole DVD fit into, say 3GB instead of 4.3. The kids will never notice, and it saves more space for the important stuff, like your porn collection.

DVD menus from remote ripped images

[renehollan]

As others will no doubt note, vlc and xine will happily process DVD menus on loopback-mounted copies of ISO images (libDVDCSS will crack them without a drive exchange). I suppose one could NFS-export them over a fast-enough network.

Re:DVD menus from remote ripped images

[Vlad_Drak]

I load up uncompressed DVDs on 54Mbit wireless nfs mounts all the time (xine -fs dvd:///path/to/stuff handles it fine) With lirc and a cheap IR receiver (xine will generate an .lircrc) you have it all. I had to manually alter the xine command line in myth way back, but they probably have that covered now. I've also used Freevo and MCE2005 for networked DVDs with no problems.

im doing the same thing...sorda...

[teksno]

well i took on the project of backing up all my DVD's to my media server, and then building a lightweight DVR HTPC...well i found the ultimate in online dvd back up knowledge...

http://www.doom9.net/

granted most of the software is based for a windows box...but if you go to the forums you can find a section dedicated for mac and *nix users...that should help you alot....

as far as keeping all the spicial features, its possible, the easiest way, rip to iso, and then mount... but if you want to compress them to mp4, you may lose the little extra vidoe bits (unless you rip those seperatly)...but keeping the extra languages audio tracks and the sub tracks isnt that big of a deal.

i know the .ogm container supports multi audio track as well as multi sub, and i believe the .mkv container supports all the abouve pluse scene selection...im not 100% sure (as i only rip the main movie in .avi with any forced subs) but if anyone can help...its the fair use freedom fighters over at doom 9

DVDRemakePro

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a Windows program, but DVDRemakePro allows you to remove stuff like the FBI warning screen, trailers, or any other part you want gone while retaining the menus and extras. It ranks right up there with DVDShrink as the most useful DVD tools I have.

Space, the final frontier ...

[RedDirt]

I'm sort of doing what you're talking about with the exception of not using MythTV for playback yet since I've not found a DVI flatpanel that I like and can afford yet. *shrug*

I've got DVD Shrink installed on all my Windows machines so that when I get a new batch of discs in, I can rip them in parallel. I also strip off CSS and Macrovision at that time so that the resulting set of files on the media server is unencumbered. For playback, I use Media Player Classic (again in Windows) to display the shows although I've verified that vlc and mplayer will also play them. I used to be able to use Apple's DVD player software on a mini, but after upgrading to Tiger and getting the latest version of the DVD player software, it won't let me play off the fileserver anymore (damn the MPAA).

Be ready to shell out some serious bucks for storage space as not doing transcoding/trimming puts some serious hurt on a pile of drives. I've ripped just shy of 300 discs (297 to be exact) and have eaten 1.6 TB out of my 1.8 TB array.

My dream is to be able to just pop the disc into a machine and have it rip the contents, decrypt and drop Macrovision and then spit the disc back out but I've not figured out a nice way to do that yet. I also want to add more storage but I've maxed out the current case and cases with lots of drive bays are quite spendy.