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Good Disk Library Solutions?
First time submitter fikx writes "How do Slashdotters manage large collections of disks? I'm hoping for a way to manage a large collection of movies that would give me menu type access to the content, and the only consumer device left seems to be the Sony disk changer, which is discontinued. I would have thought that handling disks would have been a solved problem and on sale in many forms, but I guess not. Have Slashdotters found or built solutions? Or has this problem gone the way of the typewriter?"
... is to rip everything to a large hard disk and set up some sort of media center.
Rip discs. Use media center application.
which is totally what she said
Googling for cd rom jukebox first hit in shopping is a 100 disc cd/dvd jukebox with usb and dasychainable for ~150 bucks each. other than that ISO's and a fat NAS
How big is your budget?
http://www.kaleidescape.com/
http://www.kaleidescape.com/products/
Beautiful stuff. Flawless operation. Drains your bank account.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Handbrake takes care of DRM for DVDs. For Blu-Ray use MakeMKV to extract the disc from DRM, then Handbrake to bring the file size down to 5 to 10 GB depending on the quality you want.
I'm amazed anyone DOESN'T rip their discs. Who wants to be forced to wade through stupid menus and messages that you can't skip?
... sitting on the living room floor. The system is managed by an ugly bag of mostly water.
Surprising efficient and effective.
Low tech for high brows.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
In March of 2011 I bought an HP desktop that has a media center remote. (It also has a TV tuner, BluRay, and HDMI.)
I installed XMBC, which supports the remote. It provides a great menu to navigate EVERYTHING, isos, avis, mkvs, mp3s, aacs, flacs, and some of those other whacky DVD rip formats.
The only problem is that my hard drive with about 500 gigs of DVD rips crashed! Just make sure to back up everything on a regular basis!
No, I will not work for your startup
While the price of HDDs have gone up only recently, it's a temporary "action-of-god" hike which will dissipate shortly (January?). Besides that, HDDs are dirt cheap. It's unlikely that the OP is talking about blu-rays as people who want a disc database usually have multiple (usually ripped/leeched/home) movies on each disc.
http://dacal.com.tw/ with Windows disk database, stackable with USB through ports. ;-) if you take a unit without internal drive (which reduces capacity by 50 disks).
Robot arm optional by DIY
Is there a good option (for mac preferably) that will rip a DVD after looking it up in some database (like CDDB) to get the names and indexing information correct. Ripping is easy enough, but I'm tired of choosing all the chapters for each episode when ripping season 3 of whatever. The last time I let RipIt have a go at a DVD I ended up with Battlestar Galactica disc 2 starting half way through the third episode.
paul reinheimer
The two are unrelated, actually. There a players which offer unconditional skipping and which use the disc directly.
Just put all your movies on a shelf in alphabetical order. If you have LOTS of them, then use a more orderly system. For the 5 seconds it takes to manually swap out a disc to watch a one or two hour movie, anything else is massive overkill.
I wanted a home theater PC with instant-access to all of my films. My solution was as follows:
(a) Rip all discs to hard drive,
(b) Index and link to files with software solution
In detail:
(a) I chose to go with MakeMKV for most of my ripping. It rips the mpeg2/4 video directly to an mkv file, without reencoding, and you can choose all the tracks you want to go with it. (I.e., some titles I rip multiple audio streams and subtitles, some I take just English 2.0). For me, I just ripped the main title from each film; if I want to see the special features later, I'll take the box down off the shelf and pop the disk in. (Special features don't really matter to me that much.) Each rip averages 3 to 6Gb. Now MKV, while a great file format, isn't compatible with some (especially older) consumer electronics. You can always re-encode, if you really need to make a particular title portable. And for my Blu Ray / HD-DVD titles, I re-encoded anyway. I found a 1080P 6Gb-target-size h.264 two-pass re-encode to be indistinguishable on my 52" TV from the original. In fact, it's probably quite a bit of overkill.
For storage, I have a couple of 3Tb drives in an external enclosure, with a duplicate unit for backup. (Got them for a song before the manic price gouging going on now started!.) So far, it's holding over 500 titles and several TV series, and plenty of room to grow. And I can always increase capacity.
(b) For keeping track of everything, I eventually went with Collectorz.com Movie Collector. I've tried many solutions, both free and payware, and Movie Collector was the one that fit my needs the best. (There is a lot of good software out there -- look around!) As I ripped my collection in my spare time, I simply scanned in the UPC on the back of each film using an old CueCat barcode scanner. The software then populates all of the data for the film. Once the film was ripped, I simply linked the title in Movie Collector to the video file on the hard drives. Now I can visually browse my entire collection and watch any title at the click of a mouse. And it's nice to be able to go, "Hey, how many Humphrey Bogart movies do I own?" and find out with a simple filter.
What worked for me might or might not fit your needs, but hopefully it gives you ideas.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
"Handbrake takes care of DRM for DVDs."
For *some* DVDs. It doesn't handle all of them because the producers of the DVDs keep updating their bogus DRM techniques and thus it is a constant arms race. And it is genuinely bogus, because that's what most of these techniques do: insert bogus sectors and other trickery that trips up a simple ripping program but not most DVD players (and the ones that don't work are collateral damage). Why the media producers bother to keep throwing money at a problem that people will just find a way around in order to use the product they have already bought is beyond my understanding. Do they really think they're stopping anything by spending all that money on DRM? And, no thank you, I don't want to disclose all sorts of unnecessary personal information in order to activate a digital copy that isn't ripped the way I want it anyway.
These days it's easier for a pirate to set up a movie library than a legitimate purchaser, and that situation *sucks*.
He's asking for more than just a decrypted copy of a DVD.
He wants the same thing that is commonplace and expected for a music CD: something that detects all the tracks and matches them up to content titles. Clearly he wants something that can sort out a pile of Buffy DVDs, correctly label season, episode and title names and possibly fetch extra metadata.
A simple ripper doesn't do that.
Besides Kaledescape, I am not aware of anything that does.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
That only applies to copy protection and CSS isn't copy protection. Moreover it only applies to effective copy protection and CSS definitely isn't effective at controlling copies by any definition one might want to apply.
Rip it, store it on a network storage system that XBMC can access (there are many), and stream it to your display device. There are many thin-clients you can use as an XBMC box. I personally use an old Acer Aspire Revo (which have since been discontinued). Probably the cheapest device you can use as an XBMC box that's currently available and doesn't look hideous is the Apple TV 2. For $99 with a remote that works out-of-box, you can't really beat that (granted, it can only output up to 720p).
Hard drive solutions are all well and good. But if you are using discrete disks (CD, DVD) for storage, then I highly recommend Discgear Selector products. While not automatic like a disk changer, finding and getting a disk out is as simple as sliding a knob and lifting the lid. I have several of the larger models.
And you can use the included software to maintain your library index, and print index labels for the containers.
I'm glad more 18th century Bostonians didn't think like you.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Anything that Handbrake can't handle, AnyDVD will.
There are really very few DVDs that you will need to use AnyDVD for. There have been a few failed attempts at extra copy protection on DVDs. However, for the most part it's mainly Disney disks that will give you trouble.
The vast majority of DVDs won't give you trouble.
However, since you're going to need AnyDVD for BluRays anyways you've got that as a backup option.
+...yeah. It's easier to pirate than use modern video media to it's full potential.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Citation needed.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Apple's prohibited programs fulfilling some of those requirements from being sold in the AppStore. Off the AppStore, however, there are some solutions. You might look into iVI, though it seems targeted at the anime audience. http://www.southpolesoftware.com/iVI/iVI.php
Just to fill in some detail, I have the collection alphabetized on shelves, and yup, I can walk over and get them easy enough. Just trying to declutter the movies (and possibly games, CD-ROM's, blue ray, whatever) like I did the audio CD's a while back. I ripped the audio CD's to disk easy enough, and was looking to do same with others but ripping movies I kept running into little issues. Nothing that would make it impossible, just was hoping that since discs were common for several generations of media, there was something out already to just drop the discs into. The Sony player looked promising, but it's depreciated by Sony and got lack luster reviews. Sometimes, even with unlimited HD storage, it's just nice to have the disc available for any media...
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
Because as much as I hate and disagree with it, breaking DRM is illegal in the US under the DMCA, and there are still some of us who grudgingly but respectfully honor the rule of law.
This is a classic example of stage 4 morality on Kohlberg's scale. Both stage 3 [social conformity] and stage 4 [obedience to authority] appear to be common in modern societies. Luckily, your Constitution was written by people operating (perhaps temporarily, and just for that purpose) at stage 5 [social contract], and who recognized that laws which are counter to the general welfare should be changed.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Are you saying that you have never performed an unauthorized public performance of "Happy Birthday"? You always keep the car complately under the speed limit? Never do 58 in a 55? I have yet to meet one of these mythical people that even grudgingly honor the rule of law in real life. While you might be that rare exception, I highly doubt it.
What I do see every day are people who see the law as shades of gray, and see anything darker than the shade they chose to draw their line as being criminal, and anything lighter not counting. This includes me. I consider raping, murdering, and eating your neighbors to be criminal. I don't consider copying the DVD you purchased to a hard drive that you purchased so that you can watch a movie on the TV you purchased without jumping through hoops to be criminal.
Is there a good option (for mac preferably) that will rip a DVD after looking it up in some database (like CDDB) to get the names and indexing information correct. Ripping is easy enough, but I'm tired of choosing all the chapters for each episode when ripping season 3 of whatever. The last time I let RipIt have a go at a DVD I ended up with Battlestar Galactica disc 2 starting half way through the third episode.
For the Mac, I use MetaX can write tags to ripped movie files, which gets data from tagchimp.com. But it's user-contributed data, so duplicates, errors and typos can creep in.
Give it to XBMC, then point it to thetvdb.com and imdb.com. Name the files correctly, "Farscape 1x2" for example, and let the magic of the media center software do the rest.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I am a fan of DVDCatalyst (www.tools4movies.com). It will rip and convert DVD files to various formats; has batch renaming so you can use various databases to pull information; experimental Blu-Ray support; and is inexpensive. The developer responds fast to questions (sometimes I wonder if he sleeps). I've been a fan of it for many years.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Store those movies in these file folders with plastic pockets. Buy the kind that will let you also store the jewel case printed material.
Figure out how many hours a week you are planning to watch movies from your collection. Figure out how many years it is going to take to finish what you already have. Finally realize the only reason you have such a big collection is to brag about the size of the collection. So save some money on the techno solutions and buy more movies to enhance the bragging.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I consider raping, murdering, and eating your neighbors to be criminal.
So as long as I don't eat them, it's cool? Cool.
Yeah, I upgraded my FreeBSD 8.1 box to 9.0-RC2 so I could start playing with ZFS v28. Madly sacrificing chickens in triplicate, after a Gentoo-like recompile of 400 ports, freebsd-upgrade left me a somewhat hosed system where basic services (startx, portupgrade) won't run complaining that libz.so.5 is missing. I guess I'm looking at a fresh install.
As far as I got with ZFS, it totally rocked. In my test I set up a three drive mirror (which I think of as a plain mirror with a presilvered hot spare). Seeing 35MB/s copying over the LAN with rsync/ssh. A test involving recursive scp starting following symlinks recursively on a 20GB file set, which put the gears to deduplication. It ran great. I finally killed it at a duplication level of 7.8. Doubt dedup will do much for me in production on my little LAN.
My biggest worry is that you really need ECC to protect the long-duration content in the ARC cache, not to mention critical ZFS memory structures themselves. On the Intel side, for ECC you're looking at an X3400 chipset, or an expensive Xeon chip. Apparently there are somewhat cheaper solutions on the AMD side. For the ZIL cache, people recommend mirrored SLC.
For a while we enjoyed 60% annual drive capacity growth rate, but this is projected to fall to 20% annual growth as we head toward bit patterned media. I wouldn't assume vastly greater capacities in the near term.
Here is a nice paper, sans authorship date (which the author will regret when his time comes in the Beetlejuice afterlife lobby) :
End-to-end Data Integrity for File Systems: A ZFS Case Study
He cites a recent analysis of Google server farm metrics:
DRAM Errors in the Wild: A Large-Scale Field Study
It's a little unclear how to translate this for a home-use ZFS box. Error rate is usage dependent and seems to depend on the quality of the mainboard memory access path.
A feature that might help ZFS outside of the enterprise is an ARC cache scrubber using the ZFS checksum data.
I'm still figuring this stuff out, but my impression so far is that ZFS makes the most sense where data preservation must coexist with high availability and there are fall-back measures in place on the preservation front.
He wasnt saying the law wasnt black and white. He said that peaople see the law in shades of grey and they do.
There is no such service (as CDDB) to get DVD chapters. DVD "chapters" don't really exist outside the menu-software of the DVD (a random software or hardware DVD player will never enumerate chapter names), Handbrake can handle CSV's if you really want to name them.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Also, software raid is plenty fast, and typically more robust than consumer-grade "hardware" solutions.
Very happy with MD raid-5.
"Rule of law" usually implies that laws were written by some other criteria than "he who has the gold makes the rules" (since otherwise they just become rule by the strongest, or dictatorship). Since copyright laws were written based on what Disney wanted with no regards to anything else, obeying or not obeying them has nothing to do with the rule of law.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Compromising halfway between yours and the previous poster's points, here's what my wife and I do with our 4000+ DVD collection:
1) Removed all the physical discs from their cases, removed the insert and saved it in a box in case we ever want it later (I doubt we will but all the inserts take up only one small box.) Throw away all the jewel cases.
2) Get a bunch of empty DVD and CD cake boxes (2 garbage bags full free from Craigslist.) Have a separate cake box for each letter of the alphabet (some common letters like S will have more than 1 box per letter.) You can alphabetize within each box, but I've found that's way too much work when within a couple months they'll start to get out of order. YMMV.
3) Put the cake boxes on shelves in alphabetical order. When you want to see a movie, grab that letter and rifle through it until you find it. Time to find a movie: depends mostly on luck depending on several factors, I'll leave that as an exercise for the readers, but it's generally between 1 and 10 minutes.
This method has lowered our storage space needed for our discs from 8+ entire shelving units to only 2 (with plenty of space to grow still.) I think it strikes a decent balance between convenience (it's not search-click-watch easy) and the facts that it doesn't cost anything extra and doesn't take all the effort and cost that ripping everything to large hard drives does. Of course this method presupposes that you have a computer with a DVD drive everywhere you want to watch a movie, which I do, so again YMMV. I feel my time is better used actually enjoying watching a movie rather than ripping every movie or TV show that honestly, I might never watch again. I do like another poster's idea of identifying the movies that you actually watch over and over, and ripping only those and utting the rest in easily-accessible storage.
That only applies to copy protection and CSS isn't copy protection.Moreover it only applies to effective copy protection
It most certainly is copy protection. And why would you think the DMCA only applies to "effective" protection? I know of no such distinction in the law. You'd be surprised how many times the DMCA has been invoked during lawsuits: printer cartridges, garage-door remotes ... even data streams that were not by any stretch of the imagination "encrypted" have still fallen under the DMCA.
Regardless, you could take your data, XOR each byte with 0xFF, call it copy protection, and anyone that tries to recover your data by flipping the bits back is in violation of the relevant DMCA provisions. Period.
and CSS definitely isn't effective at controlling copies by any definition one might want to apply.
Sure it is. It's extremely effective. The reality is the bulk of people who buy DVDs will never bother to make a copy, and for those that do, CSS stops them in their tracks. Sure, it's not effective at controlling decrypted copies disseminated via the Internet, but that was never the purpose of CSS. It's intent was to raise the bar sufficiently that only the most knowledgeable individuals would be able to make physical copies, to make it too inconvenient for Joe Average. And you know what? That's still true today.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
That law isn't kicking in until you give those files (or discs) to someone else.
However, I don't blame you for not wanting to be seen downloading the tools to do it.
You have the legal right to make copies for personal use, but the media companies got around that by making the requisite software illegal. Your basic Catch 22.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Kohlberg's scale has it's uses as an academic model but it's far too naive to apply in the real world.
Take the Heinz dilemma from the wiki. It is implied that stage six (universal human ethics) should be the only consideration despite there being 6 valid points made. Saving a life seems a clear win only in such a sharply defined, stark and simple example.
Conformity is implied to be little more than obedience to perceived expectations, while respecting law-and-order is obedience to a rule book. Obedient people who cannot or will not make a true ethical decision. Putting aside this ignorance for the true value of society and law, both of these are things which have evolved between a lot of people and a lot of time to be protector of rights and a shortcut for morality.
People can seek "universal human ethics", accept that it is impractical for them to make a fair judgement and default back to social expectations/law. People can accept they are ignorant of the full facts and implications, or that their stance on rights and ethics in the situation is too heavily influenced by their personal bias.
A justification based on rights or ethics does not make it a valid or true justification. Usually when politicians and people of power start gesturing excitedly and talking of rights and fundamental values I get concerned about what shit they're trying to pull now. These are the justifications and rationalisations given for decisions that were really made in self interest.
People can also accept that the ethics/rights issues at stake are truly pedantic and accept the law issues as more important. On more important issues, people can take a stand for rights and ethics yet still observe a law that runs to the contrary. Where is the category which said Heinz found a flaw in law and society therefore should seek to address it?
I notice comments promoting the constitution have been heavily upvoted, while the post supporting the rule of law is actually downvoted as flamebait. Anyone else pondering the irony, and just how conformist Slashdot is?
Sounds like a Lego Mindstorms project... Start building!
Anything that's fun is illegal in some way so you have to be a complete sourpuss to obey every single law in existence. I doubt if it's even physically possible.
It's worse than that, really. An innocent man is hard to control: make him a criminal, especially if he isn't even aware that he is, and you have him by the short and curly any time you want him.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
You didn't specify how large your collection is. If it's just a few hundred discs, then I personally agree with whoever it was way up there that just recommended one of those big honking disc binders. One or two 320-disc binders, while weightier than you might imagine, are nice and easy to keep in alphabetical order, if you've got a fairly static collection.
Once the numbers get much above that, though, yeah, I'm not sure, either. Six of those binders can break through a cheap ikea-type shelf (true story), and anyone who pipes up "rip them" can go suck on a tesla coil... I'm still trying to find a solution myself, maybe something like a DIY Redbox Kiosk, though I don't know how much those actually hold...
Cool. I'm still on FreeBSD 8, just because I'm redoing rooms in the house and don't have time to experiment :)
Like most home users crazy enough to run their own basement server, I use it for several jobs. It's a time machine target, it's a music server, it's a pictures repository, it's a CrashPlan target (thanks to Linux emulation), it's a web server, and probably things I'm forgetting. For me, the main appeal of ZFS is the data integrity. A few years ago, my backup scheme involved Unison, and it caught a bunch of corrupted pictures on my main drive trying to overwrite the good backups. So I learned - almost the hard way - never to blindly backup, to always do some kind of checksum. ZFS is even better, checking the data integrity all the time. I also happen to love the ease with which I can swap in larger drives, but that's secondary since I've always managed using other methods. Snapshots have proven to be just awesome debugging tools - but again, this is not really anything new (shadow copy, time machine, etc). I also like that I can move the drives all over to another machine and import. Actually tried this between an old Mac and FreeBSD and it works as advertised.
To deal with the ECC issue, I bought a used HP workstation from eBay. Then I stuffed a 5-disk cage in it and it hasn't had a hiccup yet. Of course, right after I did this, a coworker pointed me to an AMD-based server with bulit-in 5-disk cage on Newegg for the same price, but my timing is always awful. The OS runs off a USB stick, and every once in a while I clone the USB stick.
This is my first experience with FreeBSD, and I must say it is a very nice OS to work with. Haven't tried freebsd-upgrade yet, though :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
How many DVDs can you watch?
7 a week? Really? Haven't you got a life?
I suggest a normal person with varied interests and in employment won't watch more than 2 DVD's per week on average (and with TV, movies, music, gaming, Internet and other exotic activities like going to concerts, doing sports, or reading a book requiring our time, I reckon the number may be smaller. Have you got kids? You watch more than 2 DVDs a week, but I guess you are tired by now of watching Toy Story yet again).
So lets say you will watch 100 DVDs this year. All of them only once. And most of them, perhaps all, will never be seen again ever, because you have other 100 to watch next year.
At this time of the year if you have a DVD "collection" what I suggest you should be doing is to get rid of half of it in order to make space for next year 100 DVDs.
The situation does not change much if these DVDs are in your computer (or server farm, whatever).. YOu won't watch most of it ever anymore.
So my solution is keep a collection of 100 and be scrupulous about this: a new disk gets in one gets out. It is that simple. Eventually you build a real collection of movies that you may watch sometime again. Keep the collection in a shelf, alphabetically, and forget the bloody computer and ripping: you have better things to do with your life (I hope).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Except that the discussion was clearly about DVD playing software. Otherwise the qualifier "which use the disc directly" would be unnecessary. Plus, it's in the context of access to the contents of the DVD from computer software. (That is, after all, what TFQ and essentially every substantive comment is about.)
VLC isn't actually limited by the operating system's region restrictions. It will ignore DVD regions as well on Windows as it does on Linux. It can, however, be limited by the DVD reader firmware.
I follow this for all except kids movies/shows. They actually do watch them over and over and there are tons of shows.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
"Hey guys, is there anyway to automate boring task?"
"Sure! Just manually perform boring task first and this program will perform irrelevant task for you automatically!"
Thanks. Really.
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?
Women.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.