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Why do you store/buy/rip so many TB of movies / Tv Shows?

djrod said:
With every year a lot of new movies and TV Shows comes, some good, some bad, do you have time to watch any of the "old" stuff with all these newcomers?
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Between October and December of last year i ripped and encoded about 600 DVD (movies), not everyone of them is an absolute favorite but there are several that i do watch over and over. We have a few days a year (mostly in the winter time) where we will watch all of the LOTHR movies or Star wars movies back to back etc..

I have about 20 TV shows that i have all of the seasons for and i find myself watching these over and over. We cut out cable so it is nice to have some of these old favorites to fall back on.

All i have as far streaming is Netflix and while it is a good service the offerings can be sparse for the types of shows that i enjoy.
 
It's become something of a hobby for me. I love movies and like having them at my fingertips. I don't have to put a dvd in to watch a film - that seems archaic to me now. I also do not have to worry about the dvd becoming scratched and unplayable. Furthermore, I used my apple TV for many other things such as watching YouTube, podcasts and film trailers.
 
There a few reasons which i think contribute to it, at least for me personally.

Firstly it was so i could hide all my media which looked untidy on shelving everywhere, but then my mates would come round and be blown away by the fact that i can watch anything i want without getting off the couch.

After that i'll admit i was intent on expanding on it to make it more awesome. It sort of turned into a hobby setting up a server to deal with it all, building a modular and easy expandable storage and backup system, making sure i had a network with the bandwidth to handle HD content, setting it up so i could watch it on any device etc.

Its almost turned into a point of personal pride, the way "man-projects" tend to when a guy spends a lot of time doing something and getting it EXACTLY the way he wants. i think thats part of why i don't usually delete old rips i've only watched once, its part of my "setup" which i spent a long time getting just right.
 
I have a ton of stuff ripped because I like having it all on an external hard drive. Ideally I'll get everything ripped and hopefully one day give up cable. Now that I have some stuff ripped I'll be taking my computer to the lake where we no longer have cable/internet but still have a TV and hook it up to that.

Also, one day I hope to have a home theater where I can call up everything by a remote and not leave all day if I'm feeling lazy!

How do you store 20 TB of stuff and how is it backed up?
 
Ripping DVD's is easy with programs like MakeMKV.

I have over 1400 movies which takes up about 7TB on my NAS
I have over 230 TV shows (many complete seasons) in mixed AVI and MKV

I save everything, you might call it an addiction.
At the moment I am replacing a lot of my movies with lower bit rate copies that still look great on my 42" plasma but take up a fraction of the space in terms of storage.
 
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I'm a digital hoarder. I rip because it gives me the ability to format the file to any device I want, whether it's for my theater, my iPhone, or my iPad. Plus my Plex collection makes my friends drool, so it's kind of bragging rights more or less.

I only have digital copies of shows like 24, The West Wing, BSG, etc. I never keep copies of reality shows or shows that I consider "throwaways". Those I use Hulu and Netflix for.
 
I used to think I was bad with 3-400 CDs, but now I feel way better. I threw out a big trash can of jewel boxes in the 90s and went with a sleeves and rails system to save space and organize. Then ripped it all to a HD, then to Airport with a wire to stereo and Remote. We don't have that many DVDs though, and I'm not into the "rent and rip" trip. My video will probably be very tame compared to the dude with 1400 movies lol.
 
ashman70 said:
Ripping DVD's is easy with programs like MakeMKV.

I have over 1400 movies which takes up about 7TB on my NAS
I have over 230 TV shows (many complete seasons) in mixed AVI and MKV

I save everything, you might call it an addiction.
At the moment I am replacing a lot of my movies with lower bit rate copies that still look great on my 42" plasma but take up a fraction of the space in terms of storage.
Click to expand...


I am interested in what you are using application wise, and what formats you are using and you were using to get decent quality because when I RIP they are 8GB, then when I encode it usually takes up 700MB-1.4GB but sometimes the quality is not so great using the default settings on ATV1 in Handbrake.
 
Wicked1 said:
I am interested in what you are using application wise, and what formats you are using and you were using to get decent quality because when I RIP they are 8GB, then when I encode it usually takes up 700MB-1.4GB but sometimes the quality is not so great using the default settings on ATV1 in Handbrake.
Click to expand...

Try using the ATV2 setting instead. Produces great results for me.
 
djrod said:
With every year a lot of new movies and TV Shows comes, some good, some bad, do you have time to watch any of the "old" stuff with all these newcomers?
Click to expand...

The quality, or lack thereof, of new programming is exactly what compels me to re-watch my old favorites. While there continues to be some new stuff worth watching, it seems like less every year.

Even if that weren't the case, I would always make time for old favorites while enjoying new stuff. I find that repeated viewings help me pick up on details I missed before.
 
godslabrat said:
The quality, or lack thereof, of new programming is exactly what compels me to re-watch my old favorites. While there continues to be some new stuff worth watching, it seems like less every year.
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Really? I know it's all a matter of personal taste, but it's often said that we are in the middle of a second Golden Age of television. Thanks, in large part, to HBO (with a lot of help from Showtime, FX, USA and TNT). Not to say that there isn't a lot more dreck than ever before, thanks to reality TV. My problem is that I find too much to watch.

I do like to have some of my old favorites around, though.
 
I have a large amount of TV DVD's and it's a pain to track down a disk and a particular episode I might want to watch, encoding them into itunes, gives me streamability, the ability to copy them to my Ipad or Phone, its just so much more easier to deal with, and in my HT I use plex to organize and view them. You can fit alot of TV shows and Movies on a 2TB drive and I have 5 of them.
 
Wicked1 said:
But will those ATV2 presets work on ATV1, whatever format I use I need it to work on a Mini, ATV1, ATV2, iPad, iPad2, iPhone 4?
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Use the Universal setting. It looks good on Apple TV 2, and is backwards compatible to all of my various devices - older iPod's, iPod touches and iPad's.
 
The reality is that it doesn't take all that much time to store movies digitally. My time spent on ripping & tagging a blu-ray using MakeMKV and Handbrake is about 5 minutes. That's 5 minutes of MY TIME spent. Of course, I don't sit in front of my computer and watch the encoding process. I go and do other things with my time. That being said, the entire procedure takes around two hours for each movie using my iMac i7 3.4 (about 30 minutes in MakeMKV and 1.5 hours in Handbrake ripping to 720p).
 
dlegend said:
Also, one day I hope to have a home theater where I can call up everything by a remote and not leave all day if I'm feeling lazy!
Click to expand...
Let me tell you just how great it is to have a Mac Mini, Harmony remote, and all of your optical disc-based digital media ripped to hard drives: It's freakin' awesome :D

Like many others here I started my computer-based media system as a hobby project, but once I started it became more and more alluring. It's a lot of work—especially for those like me who love the art of film and want to keep detailed entries in their databases (I use DVDpedia) and get the most out of their media—but in the end you never have to swap discs or worry about them getting damaged. You also have your library at your fingertips, and, depending on the software you choose, you'll probably also have the cover image, synopsis of the film, and the duration, making it easy to choose a film that fits in the time you can spare.

For DVDs I rip the video_ts folder and edit the files to remove the promos, ads, FBI warnings, etc. I also disable any menu selections that lead to promos and ads. I usually spend about 30 minutes, maybe a little less, per film.

For Blu-rays I rip the disc to mkv files, convert the HD audio tracks to flac, add the flac audio to the mkv, tag all of the tracks in the mkv, and, finally, make a new mkv as a final file. The whole process takes about two to three hours per disc, but, in the end, I have HD video to match the original and HD audio, up to 8 channels. Except for the menus my BD rips are just like watching the actual disc.

How do you store 20 TB of stuff and how is it backed up?
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All of the files are on external drives (10x2 TB). My DVDs are stored alphabetically and I move things around if need be. The Blu-ray started that way but I quickly learnt that the drives fill too fast—I'd spend hours just copying from one drive to another—so I resigned myself to the necessity of just leaving the movie folders wherever there's room.

As for backing it up, well, the original discs are my backup ;) When I edit the DVDs I save the modified files (bup, vob, ifo) and backup those to disc so if I ever have to "re-install" a DVD I just rip it and copy over the modified files. For the BDs all I have are the original discs and what I can fit on old hard drives.
 
That's such a simple way to keep everything. I was expecting some crazy expensive NAS or really complicated homemade server. Good idea that at some point I'm sure I'll copy.
 
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