Unfortunately, after spending a lot of time last night and some time this morning working on my home network and on backing up a test DVD (Viva La Bam), I've run into some problems. Firstly, if I rip all my DVDs to ISOs, I haven't yet found a program that can play them other than VideoLan which is a bit complex. If I decide to compress them to Xvid, they'll run on a media center, but they're compressed. Which I guess isn't a bad thing, but it's just not optimal.

As for a media center box, it looks like a hacked Xbox is perfect for the job. I'm not going to play any games on it, so all I have to do is just buy a used one from Hollywood Video, mod it and install Xbox Media Center on it and connect it to the home network and it should work (should being the operative word). The Xbox media center software looks pretty slick, so I figure it would be easy to sort all the files into directories for each TV show and use a standard naming scheme (I'm partial to S01E01 for season 1, episode 1) and you're set. I'm not sure how metadata would be parsed (if at all) so it'd then be a problem of trying to remember what S01E01 is.

Also, my other main problem is that most of these DVDs are dual layer which I was kind of expecting, but not really. The Viva La Bam disc takes up just over 7 gigs, so at this rate, with just 233 gigs available to me, I can only get 30-35 DVDs ripped at full size on a 250 gig drive and I'd need a lot more drives to do them all. So it does seem like compression is the way to go, but for compression to work, I'll have to a) buy an Xbox to experiment with and then b) rip & compress all my DVDs which will take quite a while and then c) create metadata for each episode (up to 6 per disc).

I'll try and keep things updated here, but we'll have to wait and see how everything goes first.

URL: Doom9.net - The Definitive DVD Backup Resource