I have two PC's at home that I RIP the DVD's with. What I do is rip to an external hard drive (I have three of them, 2 x 160GB and 1 x 500GB [small USB powered drives]). The two PCs run ripping drives and I plop in new disks every 10 to 15 minutes. The resulting files are stored directly on the external drive so no need to copy it. During the week, I have one machine that I try to rip 15 movies a day with, another that I keep ripping (to the 500GB drive).
At night, I unplug the drive and move it to my MacBookPro i7 (it is my work machine so during the day it is doing other things). From there I use the Batch Rename for the movies -- takes a few minutes, not bad. Then I run the Batch Encode. BUT what I have done, is I take the third drive (160GB) and I created a "Batch Encode" directory on it, and I then create a symbolic link to it where the real "Batch Encode" directory SHOULD be. This way it writes directly to the external disk and not the internal disk that can't store much on it (and saves time of copying). I use symbolic links because until I got the process down, I was switching the function of each drive around and thus I wouldn't have to change the automator script each time. I let the encoding run all night; it can easily do 15 movies and the output files are stored on the external drive. In the morning, I take the output drive and connect it to my iTunes library server (old windows laptop) and have it import the movies into iTunes (takes a good hour or so -- it's old and it is transferring 20+GB of data). I reformat the RIP drive with the 15 movies on it, and start again.
At the end of the week, I take the 500GB drive that now has 50+ movies on it, and do the same process but this time there are more movies because my work computer is free all weekend. Thus the 50+ moves are encoded in about 35ish hours. And the 50+ output files only take up about 100gb of space so they fit nicely on the 160gb drive.
It's a nice setup; every day at least 15 new movies and on the weekend another 50. Or about 125 movies a week. Not bad.
Only two gotchas.
1) on the PC side, the software rips the movies and stores them into directories based on the volume label of the disk. Some have useless volume labels such as "VNWBPC134" and a few have "VIDEO_TS" as the label. Fortunately the app lets me change the filename before it starts; I just have to watch when inserting the disk. A few times I didn't and go through 15 movies only to find 1 labeled VIDEO_TS. . . I had to go back and figure out what it was.
2) A few movies wouldn't RIP right, so need to keep out on movies that don't encode, or encode and are only a few MB in size. These, for now, I put aside and will try to RIP on the Mac later. So far I think there are 4 movies (one of which won't rip because the kids scratched it).
It's not that bad of task, it takes time, but it is a fixed time and once it is done, it's done.
