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

I built one...

[swillden]

... and it's great.

My main reason for wanting to build a DVD jukebox with MythTV was so my kids could watch movies without them destroying their favorite DVDs. It works very well. Even my three year-old can navigate the menus and find the movies he wants without assistance (he insists on it, actually -- gets mad if you do it for him) and without damaging anything.

As for keeping special features and menus, I don't know. If you have plenty of disk space, just store the raw ISO image and xine and mplayer will do the right thing with it. Theoretically, it shouldn't be too hard to rip all of the titles from the DVD, recompress them all, and then remaster a new, smaller ISO image that still has all of the features. I don't know of anything that does it, though.

In my case, I really don't *want* the menus. I want a list of movies and when I pick the one I want, I want it to play the movie, period. No waiting two minutes for the funky intro to play through so the menu items appear. No previews. No nothing, just the movie. YMMV, of course. On the rare occasions I do want to watch some of the other features, I pull the disk off the shelf. But I have lots of shelves, so that may not work as well for you.

BTW, in case you're interested, here are the specs on my system:

• TV: Samsung 50" DLP connected via DVI.
• MythTV box: Shuttle case with an Sempron 2800+ underclocked to be a Sempron 2000+. Underclocking keeps it cooler, and therefore quieter.
• Video card: Run-of-the-mill Nvidia FX 5200 with DVI out. $30.
• Audio card: On-board VIA VT8233 AC97 audio controller with TOSLINK (optical) output.
• Audio receiver: 600W Yamaha surround sound system connected to PC via TOSLINK input.
• OS: Debian Sid
• MythTV software: current versions from Sid.
• Storage: A file server in another room (Debian Sarge, Athlon 1.4GHz), with four 200GB ATA-133 hard drives in it, each on its own controller, with LVM over RAID-5. Connected to the Myth box via Gigabit ethernet which, for some reason, only gets 100Mbps.
• Video capture card: None. We don't watch regular TV, haven't for 10+ years. I do download a few programs via Bittorrent, and I may someday get a Hauppage or the like and capture the few programs I want to watch that way instead. Or I may not. Dunno.

I still need to add an IR receiver and an IR transmitter. The receiver so that I can use a remote control (right now I'm using a wireless keyboard. It works fine, but I still want a more "traditional" remote) and the transmitter so that I can configure the MythTV box to automatically power the TV and audio receiver on and off.