Talk about a can of worms!!!

I do this and I must say that I constantly question the use of doing it. This relates directly to why B&O and others do not have a terrific system for movie storage. Apple and Kaleidescape are basically the only games in town. 

I advocate Kaleidescape for many of my clients, and it makes sense for them because they A) are not looking for a digital solution specifically but rather a mass storage solution and B) they're far wealthier than me and have less to worry about if the marked tacks toward a different solution. For me, however, with my paltry dealer's stipend, I must seek other alternatives. 

For a time I was ripping both sanctioned digital copy and other basic DVDs into iTunes for access by iPhone, iPad, AppleTV, etc. However, this solution was so troublesome it made me want to revert to a near-Amish lifestyle where even buttons are considered too prideful. Basically the number of times I had to (against my will) drain my AppleTVs and other devices of content and re-map my library quickly became unacceptable. Because of the DRM measures that underpin the iTunes environments, the devices are compelled to eject any and all content from themselves whenever there is a sign-in, sign-out, remap event of any type. So Apple gets an A for effort and something below an F for execution. 

This has brought me to the WD Live media "thing" which is just a tiny box presumably filled with codecs and could not be simpler. What it lacks in polish and elegance it makes up for in pure ease. It's a net connected device so I can load it remotely and it has a big old hard drive attached that houses all my video content. It's also in the PUC so I've made it a matrix source at home and have been enjoying it so far. 

Until the DRM environment is less limiting (surely Apple would be better if it wasn't tied to content distribution) I think that these Tvix box type solutions are the best bet. They're open-souce and basically just menus for list navigation.

The only real pain remains the sheer amount of time it takes to rip the movies to a digital format!

Thank you trip for a very detailed answer. Not as easy as CD storage then.😂 Ill look into the Western Digital TV Live. Looks like just what I am after. Not bothered about how fancy it looks, as long as it works.

Craig🙂

I have three first-gen Apple TVs: one connected to my Avant in the Bedroom, one connected to my BS1/BV4 in the den/home gym, and one connected to the BeoSystem 3 and projector in the living room of my loft. For years, I haven't kept any content stored on the Apple TVs' internal hard drives. Rather, I stream everything to the Apple TVs from my iTunes library stored on a Drobo and connected to my iMac. This has worked ideally. Up to 16 TB of storage.

I think that Steve Jobs was dead-on when he said that people don't like to have to sync their content on the Apple TV's internal hard drive. Such syncing gets glitchy. Streaming from the Mac's iTunes library is definitely the way to go. Actually, that will be the only option with the forthcoming 2nd gen Apple TV.

The free program "Handbrake" on the Mac does an excellent job of ripping DVD movies to a format that can be stored in iTunes and streamed to the Apple TV. The pre-sets are easy to use and the ripping is faster than it was in prior versions of Handbrake. It can also convert divx files to iTunes/Apple TV format.

16TB of  mediafiles???

I've about 70gb of music/movie....it's a lot of time

Honestly,it take years to watch/listen everything....too dispersive

I believe the question was software; AVS video converter is one.

I've been using DVD Shrink 3.2 for years. Works perfectly AND it's free.

FrankJ wrote:

I've been using DVD Shrink 3.2 for years. Works perfectly AND it's free.

Not to mention that it allows you to get rid of useless content in the process, thus saving space 😕

FrankJ

Can you email me the file or point me at a site that does not want to bundle cr*p with it - spent some time last night looking / trying!

Tony

Craig wrote:

Really thinking of storing all my DVD's on a PC..

I've always found ripping DVDs always resulted in a poor quality version, whatever options I selected. Indeed, if you were planning on "backing up" a Blu-ray, bear in mind the size of the file on your computer. 3 x Blu-ray ripped DVDs would result in more than 100GB of data.

Plus, how many times to you play the same DVD? It's not like a CD which you might listen to a couple of times a week.

For these reasons, I've never bothered ripping my entire DVD collection. I think I have around 30 Blu-rays, so it's impractical.