Courtesy Ken Hutchinson, we followed Straw Dogs up with Ladyhawke last night and may watch War Games tonight (without actually using Matthew Broderick, though he also stars in both). A list:

WarGames (John Wood and T.B.D.)
Ladyhawke (Ken Hutchison and John Wood)
Straw Dogs (Dustin Hoffman and Ken Hutchison)
Rain Man (Ray Baker and Dustin Hoffman)
Without a Paddle (Bruce Phillips and Ray Baker)
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Stephen Ure and Bruce Phillips)
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Katie Jackson and Stephen Ure)
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Viggo Mortensen and Katie Jackson)
Crimson Tide (Gene Hackman and Viggo Mortensen)
Superman IV (Christopher Reeve and Gene Hackman)
Superman III (Jackie Cooper and Christopher Reeve)
Superman II (Ned Beatty and Jackie Cooper)
Superman (Robert O'Neill and Ned Beatty)
Twelve Monkeys (Bruce Willis and Robert O'Neill)
Mercury Rising (Chi McBride and Bruce Willis)
The Terminal (John Williams and Chi McBride)
Star Wars: Episode VI (Anthony Daniels and John Williams))
Star Wars: Episode V (Peter Mayhew and Anthony Daniels)
Star Wars: Episode IV (James Earl Jones and Peter Mayhew)
The Hunt For Red October (Stellan Skarsgård and James Earl Jones)
Ronin (Jean Reno and Stellan Skarsgård)
Godzilla (1998) (Ben Bode and Jean Reno)
Empire Records (Liv Tyler and Ben Bode)
Armageddon (Owen Wilson and Liv Tyler)
Permanent Midnight (Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson)
Keeping the Faith (Edward Norton and Ben Stiller)
Rounders (Edward Norton - Starting Film)

URL: Ken Hutchison

I know most people probably don't care, but for those that might stumble on the site via Google or some other search engine, my episodic dvd ripping is going well. Last night, I set my computer to rip and convert all of Seinfeld Season 2. It took about 24 hours to process the 13 episodes, but it was worth it (note: I will compare this later when my new computer is built to see how much faster an AMD Athlon 64 can handle the duties).

When all was said and done, 18.7 gigs of Seinfeld DVDs were shrunk to 4.46 in 20 episodes (18 original + 2 alternate versions) through the first two seasons while Viva La Bam: Season 1 was shrunk from 7.0 gigs to 3.55 gigs over 8 episodes. Kind of odd the different compression ratios I got considering the same process was used. I guess depending on the quality of the original video and the way in which it was shot (fast motion action (Bam) vs. slow sit-com action (Seinfeld)) makes a difference. Either way, I've done 5 DVDs and I have 8.02 gigs (let's just call it 8 for simplicity). Previously, I figured I'd have 150 DVDs to rip, so...let's go with the 5/8 ratio and we end up with 150 DVDs taking up 240 gigs of space. After proper formatting, and sector sizing, the 250 gig drive comes out to only 233 gigs of usable space (probably will be less than 230 usable gigs after more room gets taken up), so I will need another drive to hold all of my television episodes - but that's no problem since the original media center idea called for 2x250 gig drives and optimally, I'd like a third to set them up in a RAID5+1 configuration.

Either way, I just have to keep ripping to see how it all comes out and I also need to figure out how to get the metadata worked into each file. Right now, they're very simply named with the tv show name, the season & episode number, and the title of the episode - so we have:

Seinfeld S01E01 - The Seinfeld Chronicles (Original).avi
Seinfeld S01E01 - The Seinfeld Chronicles (Revised).avi
...
Seinfeld S02E13 - The Deal.avi
and
Viva La Bam S01E01 - Phil's Hell Day.avi
...
Viva La Bam S01E08 - Scavenger Hunt.avi

And while that may be good if you know what happens in "The Pony Remark." But if you don't...then it would be nice to have maybe a screenshot and the description of:

"Jerry inadvertently offends his elderly relative by saying he hates people who had ponies growing up. The woman dies before Jerry can clear the air. Jerry is torn between attending her funeral and playing in a championship softball game."

Progress to be continued...next up for ripping: MI-5: Season 1 & 2.

And for those concerned, even though I am violating the DMCA (which is an asinine law in and of itself), I am only making backup copies for my own personal use. These files are not going to be shared outside the house and I do believe that my own private use is lawful no matter what I decide to do with the stupid CSS encryption being used on these DVDs.

URL: "Seinfeld" (1990)

Just a quick update on my "TV SERVE" status (that's the name of the new hard drive - see a couple days back for more information). After researching on the doom9.org forums and investigating a few different programs, it seems the best way to get consistent quality at a fast speed without much work is a combination of DVD Decrypter and Auto Gordian Knot. DVD Decrypter takes the DVD and rips the PGC's to the drive bit for bit so you have an uncompressed copy of each episode (PGC) that then needs to be compressed - which is where AutoGK comes in. AutoGK compresses the file into a stand-alone AVI using the XviD compressor at a specified file size. After A LOT of experimenting over the weekend with Viva La Bam: Season 1, I finally settled on using the 85% target quality options and I got acceptable file sizes.

The 8 episodes from Season 1 of Viva La Bam are now compressed from 7.5 gigs (total size (including extras) of the original DVD) down to 3.55 gigs. I like this size because they're still big files with great quality, but it's about half the size and in that 3-4 gig target range I specified earlier (though I'll probably need to get another 250 gig drive when they go on sale again). I just finished encoding the first 5 (6 if you count the pilot twice - original and revised) episodes of Seinfeld and they come out to about 1.4 gigs. That's the full first season and now I have to work on the second season which weighs in at 13 episodes. Here's my quick cheat sheet for encoding I typed up so I could remember the settings:

DVD DECRYPTER
-------------
IFO Mode
Rip PGC's for each episode
No Stream Processing
Settings > IFO Mode
>>No File Splitting
>>Copy IFO File
>>Remove RC, RCE & PUO's
>>Patch M2V Timecode
>>Stream Information (Add'l Files)
Settings > General
>>Remove Macrovision
>>Check for Structure Protection
>>Other > All Checked

AUTO GK
-------
DVD Input
Target Quality: 85%!!
Advanced > Auto
CTRL+F9 > Animation if applicable

URL: AutoGK Homepage - THE Tool for XviD / DivX conversion

It's been a while since I really had a chance to watch movies with my busy schedule, but today, with a nice day off, we plowed through three movies that could not be more diverse. Picking up where we left off with "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King", we decided to follow Bruce Phillips to one of my newer DVDs, the comedy, "Without a Paddle" - it was an interesting way to start the day, but it's a fun movie and some of the comedy in it is great. After "Without a Paddle", I noticed that we could then make the transition to "Rain Man" via Ray Baker. Back when we started the movie game, I wanted to somehow get to "Rain Man" so we could then transition to "Straw Dogs" via Dustin Hoffman and today, we finally did it. Following up "Rain Man," we watched "Straw Dogs" - a very interesting film - and then we finished the day with the latest episode of "24" sans commercials thanks to the DVR. All in all, it was a long, but very productive (depending on how you view productivity) day. We made great progress in the movie game, though, with "Straw Dogs" we kind of backed ourselves into a corner and there are very few movies to follow up with - the four I own that we can use are: "Spider-Man," "American History X," "Time Bandits," and another Criterion Collection film (like "Straw Dogs"), "Brazil." We might take the easy route to "Spider-Man" though personally, I haven't seen "American History X" in a while and it is a great film.

Films watched to date (in reverse order):

Straw Dogs (Dustin Hoffman and T.B.D.)
Rain Man (Ray Baker and Dustin Hoffman)
Without a Paddle (Bruce Phillips and Ray Baker)
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Stephen Ure and Bruce Phillips)
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Katie Jackson and Stephen Ure)
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Viggo Mortensen and Katie Jackson)
Crimson Tide (Gene Hackman and Viggo Mortensen)
Superman IV (Christopher Reeve and Gene Hackman)
Superman III (Jackie Cooper and Christopher Reeve)
Superman II (Ned Beatty and Jackie Cooper)
Superman (Robert O'Neill and Ned Beatty)
Twelve Monkeys (Bruce Willis and Robert O'Neill)
Mercury Rising (Chi McBride and Bruce Willis)
The Terminal (John Williams and Chi McBride)
Star Wars: Episode VI (Anthony Daniels and John Williams))
Star Wars: Episode V (Peter Mayhew and Anthony Daniels)
Star Wars: Episode IV (James Earl Jones and Peter Mayhew)
The Hunt For Red October (Stellan Skarsgård and James Earl Jones)
Ronin (Jean Reno and Stellan Skarsgård)
Godzilla (1998) (Ben Bode and Jean Reno)
Empire Records (Liv Tyler and Ben Bode)
Armageddon (Owen Wilson and Liv Tyler)
Permanent Midnight (Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson)
Keeping the Faith (Edward Norton and Ben Stiller)
Rounders (Edward Norton - Starting Film)

URL: Straw Dogs (1971)

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

I guess I didn't really need another hard drive (my parallel ports are already full), but as I looked at the price (250 gigs for $140 and I had a $20 store credit), I just couldn't pass up the deal on a nice new Maxtor Ultra16 250 GB PATA hard drive. Right now, I'm not really sure how I'm going to use it. It's still sitting here blank in my computer as it replaced a really old 20 gig Maxtor drive from 2000. But I've now quickly gained 230 gigs (well...actually only 210 as when it's formatted, the drive is only 233 gigs) and I'm debating how to use it. I think I might start my "television server" project that I've been thinking about for a while, but there some details to get hammered out first.

Basically, I want to take one of my older computers (I have one sitting here that no longer works unfortunately) and just drop the 250 gig drive into it with tons of television shows ripped onto it from DVDs. This way, I can instantly call up any Seinfeld episode at any time from any room equipped to receive it and watch an episode without commercials. Or I can watch any Simpsons, Family Guy or Alias episode too. But before that all gets started, I have to figure out what format I want to rip the DVDs to. I don't want to rip them bit for bit as each DVD is 3-4 gigs and my little 233 gig drive would fill up quickly (though I had planned on having 500 gigs (466 effectively) in the server). So now that I think about it, if I do rip the DVDs bit for bit (minus the special features) I could probably fit 100 or so on two 250 gig drives. Now...let's take a second to figure out how many TV-DVDs I have...

24 - 6 discs x 3 seasons = 18
Alf - 2 discs x 1 season = 2
Alias - 6 discs x 3 seasons = 18
Aqua Teen Hunger Force - 3 discs (I think) x 3 seasons = 9
Arrested Development - 3 discs x 1 season = 3
Band of Brothers - 5 discs x 1 season = 5
Chapelle's Show - 2 discs x 1 season = 2 (2 more soon)
Family Guy - 4 discs x 2 seasons = 8
Futurama - 3 discs x 1 season = 3 (possibly more soon)
The Hire - 1 disc x 2 seasons = 2
MI-5 - 4 discs x 2 seasons = 8 (disc average)
Millenium - 4 discs x 1 season = 4
Mystery Science 3000 Collection = 2 discs x 1 season = 2 (more soon)
Reno 911! - 2 discs x 1 season = 2
SNL: The Best Of... - 1 disc x 4 actors = 4
Seinfeld - 4 discs x 2 seasons = 8 (more soon hopefully)
The Simpsons - 4 discs x 5 seasons = 20 (more soon of course)
The X-Files - 7 discs x 2 seasons = 14 (more soon...but expensive!)

Coming in February - MacGyver: Season 1 and I want to add complete South Park Seasons. So...with the DVDs above, we're at 132 owned DVDs with at least 15 more coming, so let's assume 150 TV-DVDs in my collection that I'd want to serve up. If each one takes up 3 gigs, I could probably fit them on two 250 gig drives and some probably will take less space than the others at a 1-1 conversion ratio. So maybe I don't have to compress them - full motion video should easily stream over standard ethernet cabling and I plan on upgrading any computers that would be on said network to gigabit networking, so I'd have no problems streaming (or so I'm told).

Glad I took the time to work it all out. I was trying to figure out how I'd want to compress them, how I'd store them, what exactly I'd do - but now there's no need. I'll just rip them without compression and without special features and when I fill up one drive, I'll add another and even two more if need be so I'd have 1 TiB on demand. Now that'd be sweet. It just wouldn't fit in one of those nice mini-atx systems.

And yes - I have too many DVDs and spare time.

URL: Maxtor.com - Ultra16 Hard Drive Kits