Media centre PC - best solution to compile DVD library?

[ivortheinjun]

Hi,

First of doubtless several confused posts!

I'm looking into building a media centre PC complete with hard drive sufficiently big enough to hold a big portion of our DVD collection.

A mate is trying to convince me that the best bet to rip the DVDs and convert to avi, but I quite like the idea of having the DVD menus available.

If I go down the conversion route, some of the discs I'm looking to back-up are for the series M*A*S*H, and my preferred way of watching these is with an alternate audio track that doesn't have the canned-laughter (something I wish more DVDs would offer!).

I've built PCs before, but never a media centre. I'm not familiar with the software, and one thing I'm wondering is if there's a way of compiling a library of VOB files which can then be accessed by a menu, or if it would be a case of having to cycle through folders manually? Or is cycling through media files reserved for the likes of mpg, avi and mkv files where Media Centre software is concerned?

Incidentally, I'm probably going to be tied to Windows for this project, as the PC will also have to house iTunes.

Any guidance very much appreciated. For starters it would be great to get some guidance on what the DVD ripping software of choice is at the moment - I haven't tried to rip a DVD for about 5 years, and I'm guessing the world of encryption has moved on!

[Stephen Neal]

I'm very happy with the MyMovies set-up on my PC under Media Center.

I rip (the DVDs I own) to uncompressed ISOs and use Virtual Clone Drive in MyMovies to mount these. Others used VIDEO_TS folders. (I went uncompressed as I didn't want any loss of vision or sound quality and also wanted the original menus. I watch a lot of non-English language movies so subtitles needed to remain intact and navigable easily as well. It is also much quicker!)

The only downsides of MyMovies is that it is still rendered in HTML (now a bit klunky in look) rather than MCML (though work continues, albeit quite slowly for us impatient users!, on a slicker MCML interface).

Because Extenders don't support DVD ISO or VIDEO_TS replay - if you want to play on extenders you may need to convert your DVDs to a different format.

[fumanchu2001]

I prefer to use DVDFab to rip to VIDEO_TS folders and just use VMC to display them via DVDlibrary 'Gallery' registry change...

I rip without the menu's and extras as I just want the movie to play when I select one, (this does not mean losing quality of the main movie) You can also select which sound track you want to include.

[James45]

I use Video_TS folders and My Movies 2 as well, very happy with it but looking forward to ver3, hoping it will be slicker and quicker.

I wish windows MCE remote would have audio and subtitle buttons for switching on the fly rather than having to go into the menus though.