NOTE, complete change in plans Using Handbrake to digitize the movies. The latest version is pretty much one button now:

http://handbrake.fr/

I rip a DVD 1st with AnyDVD HD and Clone DVD 2 from Slysoft to get rid of DRM AND trailers, subtitles, commentators, warnings, menus, etc. From the ripped, burned disk, it is only 20 minutes to encode. File is <=2GB so a 2TB drive will hold my whole collection.

Works with All My Movies to play directly from the program.

I will also be buying several standalone media players to try out that handles 2TB drives and HDMI so I can give to family.

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John E Pombrio
Do not meddle in the affair of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

What format? AVI?

The WinX DVD Ripper Platinum program has a laundry list of formats, but yes. AVI is my 1st choice. (Note: given up on this one due to lacking a way to get 5.1 sound out).

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John E Pombrio
Do not meddle in the affair of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

K, got a working system for doing movies to the relatives.

1.Handbrake along with AnyDVD HD and Clone DVD2.

2. Masscool 1080P Media Player for $89.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833197004

3. 2 TB hard drive for $75
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152245

Should be able to rip all my movies (875+) onto the hard drive and build a few systems for Xmas.

The Masscool has a very nice image and can do 5.1 (using .mkv and HDMI cable) sound when playing back. The video playback even better than my Win7 HTPC with ATI HDMI graphics card. Extremely simple file system interface but it works fine for what I want it to do.

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John E Pombrio
Do not meddle in the affair of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

Very misleading... Xbox 360 does not support mp4s with an AC3 5.1 audio track... Only avi's are supported for this feature.

Dang... Ted is right, the WinX DVD ripper platinum IS only 2 channel, I think. It shows UP as Dolby Prologic AND the rear speakers are working, but the receiver's diagram shows only Left and Right speakers on both HDMI ( and on media player's Optical Port). This is the same as on my new media player. Time to fool with the ripper...again <sigh>. I just cannot get a break with rippers.

NOTE: Decided to go to Handbrake and skip streaming to XBox360

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John E Pombrio
Do not meddle in the affair of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

K, I managed to get 5.1 working on the Masscool Media player over the HDMI cable using Handbrake and .mkv extension. That is the way I am going. The ONLY thing that I will be lacking is a way to stream to the XBox360, but I have the media player! The media player works fine if I just hook up the HDMI to the TV and play over the built in speakers. I can play .mkv via Windows Media Player with the CCC codec pack. So my HTPC will work fine with the movies too. T'hell with the 360.

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John E Pombrio
Do not meddle in the affair of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

It looks like you have two options if you'd like to stream to the xbox 360 with surround sound with that software: rip to WMV with advanced audio or AVI with embedded AC3 (does DTS embed in AVI - I dunno...).

I've given up streaming to the xbox 360 a long time ago... I'd rather have a file that plays across multiple platforms (Apple products - non 1080, Linux HTPC, Windows 7 products, etc) so I rip to m4v with two audio tracks - AC3 and AAC.

I have given up completely the idea of streaming any movie to the 360. Why bother?

The ONLY way I have found to get true 5.1 surround sound is with Handbrake and .mkv. All the other rippers and for all the other formats, it only comes out to two channels or possibly pseudo 5.1. Mind you, I have "only" tried 10 or 12 rippers! Handbrake is free, very elegant and is easy to use. I will stack 3 optical drives on a machine to queue up and batch process.

In thinking about it, the media player and hard drive is so cheap that any place I want to have access to movies, I will either have a HTPC (preferred -one in my house), a Win7 PC (three of those in the house), or a media player for movies and the 360 for Netflix streaming (or DVD playing) at the main A/V receiver. I also have a complete computer sitting here with the guts and graphics card to make another HTPC instead, getting rid of the need for the media player and XBox live for online access.

All in all, $165 for a full 1080P media player with 5.1 sound and 2 TB hard drive is a bargain. I just bought 3 more media player setups, 4 all together. Cheap, small, portable, only need one HDMI cable and one power cable for complete playing of movies, downloaded TV shows, handles music, I cannot imagine a more practical and welcome gift.

Now all I have to rip the damn things... 875 disks on the wall, 875 to go...

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John E Pombrio
Do not meddle in the affair of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

Up to the G's... So far, excellent results. Movies look extremely good and sound great considering that they average about 1 Gb each. Takes about 15 minutes to do a movie, I can queue movies up to the limit of DVD optical drives I have installed, and I have two machines going full blast.

All the movies play well with Windows Media Player as well as on the cheap Masscool media player. The Masscool does well streaming movies across the network. All my Win 7 machines recognize the media player as VENUS on the network.

No issues slinging movies around from drive to drive, machine to machine, or machine to media player. I started out dumping everything directly to media player but now am loading them first onto a 2TB hard drive so I can move the movies quickly. I then back them up onto the media player.

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John E Pombrio
Do not meddle in the affair of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

sounds like you have a nice amount of work ahead of you (and behind you).

You could possibly increase your speed by:
Rip the dvds to a temporary location on your hard disk instead of using handbrake directly against the optical drives - since the bottleneck is usually handbrake - you can queue up handbrake with as much as you can fit on your hard drive. Then as one completes - you can delete the dvd from the hard drive and queue up another one.

After your completely done ripping movies / tv shows - check out metax - its a great program to tag your videos. It includes video artwork, tagging with the HD/SD tag, ratings, all that jazz.

are you using a preset in handbrake? perhaps the xbox preset? If so, I'd suggest changing that to a high profile preset. You'll get higher quality video and most of your players should support the High profile. test it out of course - before you take the advice though.

Also - check your preset and your available screen resolutions of your devices. Chances are good the reason it's only taking 15 minutes per disc is that your downscaling HD content to 720p. IMHO, if I have a 1080p movie - I'd want a 1080p rip of that movie.

Last night - I ripped two discs - South Park Season 14 DVD Disc 3 and Cyrus (blu-ray). I started at 5:30 and had everything ripped, tagged and copied over to my WHS by 11 PM.

If your going the XBMC route - let me tell you - newer isn't always better. I have natty narwal installed on my htpc (corei7-950 with an NVidia GEforce GT-430) and the latest nightly of XBMC. I have been tweaking my settings for a few days now and am still having troubles with minor tearing and jerkiness (mostly with my 1080p content).

None of my movies are Blu Ray so the media player is upconverting to 1080P on playback. Yeah, I have tried several of the other settings for handbrake but the default one (except for 6 channel discrete audio which is the only setting that plays 5.1 over the HDMI cable on my media player) is the setting that handbrake recommends most so I am going with it. Whatever Handbrake is doing, the playbacks look great on everything I have run them on and the size is small enough to make my entire collection fit on one hard drive. Amazing that. The ONLY trouble I have found is that the audio sometimes cuts out when I "chapter" ahead on the media player, but that is easily fixed by redoing the chapter. Otherwise, on the HTPCs -which are only Win7 64bit computers with ATI graphics cards in them- everything runs using Windows Media Player and the CCCP codex pack.

As for speed, it is actually going pretty darn fast! I stuck 3 opticals in one machine and 2 in another, so just have to queue them up every 30 minutes or so - 5 at a pop. I thought about putting them on the hard drive but that takes a while too so might as well touch a movie only once.

I have a paid copy of AllMyMovies that also the artwork, ratings, tags and runs the movies for my two HTPCs.

Thanks for the suggestions tho!

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John E Pombrio
Do not meddle in the affair of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

ANY converter that works is a "great" converter. But it is the one that I have learned to use, quickly converts, starts up with all my settings intact, and plays on my media player along with all my computers that is the "best" for me. I tried, what, 10 different converters until I finally found Handbrake. It was the damn 5.1 audio that was the toughest, it had to play anywhere from 2 channel TV speakers all the way to full blown HDMI 5.1 audio through my Yamaha receiver. Only Handbrake succeeded in this AND had a great picture too.
There are a lot of beautiful women around but marry the one that you can live with...

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John E Pombrio
Do not meddle in the affair of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

So my project is all done and the media players are all handed out. 6 media players with ONE THOUSAND and TWENTY FOUR movies and huge number of TV shows; LOST, FRINGE, Smallville, Burn Notice, CSI, Flash forward, Eureka, all the Stargates, Dexter, The Big Bang Theory, Sarah Conner Chronicles, Modern Marvels, and a half a dozen more. Then I added the The Teaching Company Video lectures .. ALL THESE packed onto a 2TB hard drive and will play on any flat screen TV 720p to 1080p, from 2 channel audio to 5.1 surround sound receivers or will stream to any computer. Weighs a couple of pounds and can be moved from house to house or from TV to TV. Hella'of a box.

I keep a 2TB hard drive in my main computer to back up all these boxes. When I go to someones house, I update my box and swap with theirs so movies are constantly being added and TV show episodes updated. Using Directory Opus, takes only 20 minutes to update a box.

Rave reviews from all the relatives that got the boxes. So far, Lost is the big winner here, along with Sarah Conner Chronicles.

_________________
John E Pombrio
Do not meddle in the affair of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.