Help me build a new PC to rip my DVDs

chewystuey

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Hi All,

My compute needs are pretty basic so I've stayed on my mac mini for years. However I now want to rip all of my DVDs and Blu Rays to make them available on streaming devices round the house (mix of streamers and TVs) and potentially to take with me on a tablet.

When I've done a little bit of this on my old mac mini it's taken AGES (often real time!) to rip the DVD!!

So what I want to do is build a cracking little system that will rip as quickly as possible. I am told CPU is more important than ram or disc for this process but clarification would be good.

I am presuming I want a quad core i7 and at least 8GB of RAM but any recommendations (or info on your systems) would be really helpful.

As to budget - hmmm shall we say £600-£700? (about what I would spend on a new mac mini).

Thanks!
 
You could settle for an i5 cpu also a fair bit of storage space, especially for bluray but a lot of Blu-ray Disc are protected so would need to get software to open those. I have done this on my laptop and opened disc and copied the biggest file (which is all you need ) can be upto and over 20-30gig. Dvd's take up considerably less space. How are you going to store and stream these?
 
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Purely for ripping the thing that matters is the speed of the drive.

CPU power only comes in if you're converting the file as well. Typically if you're ripping a lot of DVDs you might convert their video to a newer and more efficient format to save yourself some space. You might also convert if you want to playback on devices that have poor format support and only support specific formats.

Unless your mini PC is really old and only has a DVD drive that can read in real time (1x, 2x) I'm guessing you are converting.

If you're converting to a common format such as H.264 then graphics these days comes with dedicated circuits to do the conversion. Even integrated graphics. In fact, especially integrated graphics - Intel's quick sync is one of the best. This means that you only need a powerful CPU if you want the extra control and slightly higher quality that doing the conversion on the CPU affords.

The wizard's question about storage is a good one. If you're after a small PC then obviously a bazillion terrabytes spread out across a dozen drives will be out of the question. Will these be going on an external NAS/Fileserver and if not what's sort of storage amount do you need and is there an existing drive or two you need it to take (and if so, what form factor are they)?
 

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