Rebuilding DVD Collection - Recommended Format

B

bLiTzJoN

Weaksauce
Joined
Dec 29, 2006
Messages
81
Well, spent the weekend working on a RAID1 degrade. Fixed it (family photos, videos, etc..) and all was well (Thank, God!), then for some strange reason a drive on my RAID5 decided to orphan on me today causing the entire array to offline to an unrecoverable state. Deleted the array and fired up RAID Reconstructor to see what I could pull off - no good, lost my entire DVD collection! Arrrrgh!! It's taken me about a year to build this up. It was 4x1TB, so I'm going with 2 Mirror sets and lose the extra TB for safer redundancy. By the time I get 2TB filled, I should have the cash to buy more drives.

*wipes tears*

Ok, so I am using 7MC and extending to my Xbox. My wife likes the interface, so it would be hard to move away and I can't build a 2nd htpc at the moment (best, I know). You are in my shoes now, so if you have a chance to do it all over, what format would you consider?

Word of Wisedom: Never use RAID5!
 
Yup, RAID is not a backup - if you had a power surge, for example, you would be in the same situation regardless of what RAID level you chose.

BUT how many movies are we talking about and what kind of storage space. I would go for uncompressed .vob files, but that's just me. Most encode to something smaller like x.264 HDD space is soo cheap now a days.
 
I had about 600 movies. I realize RAID is not backup, but having backups to me is simply owning the DVDs. How else would you backup terabytes of data in a cost effective manner? I figured some redundancy array with battery backup was the best defense I could afford at the time. What is done is done, I killed the members and created 2x1TB mirrored sets.

I want the best quality possible and still play on an extender. I ripped everything to WTV originally and it was working pretty good, but support on none M$ stuff, even M$ stuff older than Vista, is non-existent at this time. I purchased a WD TV Live to play around with and it won't see WTV files, but will pretty much see everything else. I thought about playing with a couple formats to see what works, for now I'll do VOBs to start the ripping process [over]. Fun Fun :(
 
I recommend only ripping the movies you watch on any kind of regular basis. I dont have all my disks on the hard drive...its a waste of space to put some of that crap on there. I save my space for favorites and unwatched movies....but vob format for the win. media browser will see vobs I am told.
 
I'm ripping all my DVD's/Blu rays right now as well and went with MKV.

I was doing straight rips to disk and then playing them, but when I thought about my TV series it got impossible because I wanted to have individual episode metadata. So, being as I'm OCD over order, I chose MKV, as I can get my individual episodes, remove the stuff I don't need (I don't speak or read Spanish, so why keep it on disk), and have a common format for my TV shows, DVD's and Blu Rays, minimizing the amount of other crap I need to play them/upkeep metadata.
 
I had all the "important" movies ripped the first month or so about a year ago since then I had moved on to the rest of the collection cause I had plenty of space to do so.
 
Kihaji said:
I'm ripping all my DVD's/Blu rays right now as well and went with MKV.
Click to expand...

I was considering MKV, but I'm not sure how extender friendly the format will be. I did a couple BDs in MKV and couldn't play them, because they were enormous so the extender stuck in buffering hell and never showed a picture, but was promising if the size was more manageable. I'll put it on the list to try. I assume you use MakeMKV?
 
I personally keep everything in VIDEO_TS folder structures with VOBs and all. Then again, I have over 500 DVDs, so I don't have the time or desire to convert them. I use DVDFab to pull only the main movie, English subtitles, and AC 5.1 English audio (DTS 5.1 when available). It only takes about 5-10 minutes per movie. The sizes varies greatly, but generally a DVD9 movie of about 7.5gb would usually be reduced to about 3.5 to 4gb when running them through DVDFab.

Windows Media Center recognizes VIDEO_TS structures natively, so there's no special considerations to make. My media storage structures are as follows:

z:\Animated
z:\Animated\Bolt
z:\Animated\Bolt\VIDEO_TS
z:\Animated\Bolt\mymovies.xml
z:\Animated\Bolt\dvdid.xml
z:\Animated\Bolt\backdrop.jpg
z:\Animated\Bolt\folder.png
 
Azhar said:
I personally keep everything in VIDEO_TS folder structures with VOBs and all. Then again, I have over 500 DVDs, so I don't have the time or desire to convert them. I use DVDFab to pull only the main movie, English subtitles, and AC 5.1 English audio (DTS 5.1 when available). It only takes about 5-10 minutes per movie. The sizes varies greatly, but generally a DVD9 movie of about 7.5gb would usually be reduced to about 3.5 to 4gb when running them through DVDFab.

Windows Media Center recognizes VIDEO_TS structures natively, so there's no special considerations to make. My media storage structures are as follows:

z:\Animated
z:\Animated\Bolt
z:\Animated\Bolt\VIDEO_TS
z:\Animated\Bolt\mymovies.xml
z:\Animated\Bolt\dvdid.xml
z:\Animated\Bolt\backdrop.jpg
z:\Animated\Bolt\folder.png
Click to expand...

ideal config IMO.
 
bLiTzJoN said:
Well, spent the weekend working on a RAID1 degrade. Fixed it (family photos, videos, etc..) and all was well (Thank, God!), then for some strange reason a drive on my RAID5 decided to orphan on me today causing the entire array to offline to an unrecoverable state. Deleted the array and fired up RAID Reconstructor to see what I could pull off - no good, lost my entire DVD collection! Arrrrgh!! It's taken me about a year to build this up. It was 4x1TB, so I'm going with 2 Mirror sets and lose the extra TB for safer redundancy. By the time I get 2TB filled, I should have the cash to buy more drives.

*wipes tears*

Ok, so I am using 7MC and extending to my Xbox. My wife likes the interface, so it would be hard to move away and I can't build a 2nd htpc at the moment (best, I know). You are in my shoes now, so if you have a chance to do it all over, what format would you consider?

Word of Wisedom: Never use RAID5!
Click to expand...

you lost your raid5 with only 1 faulty drive? That's strange, never happened to me before. I've replaced dozens of faulty drives on raid 5 arrays and everytime I was able to rebuild the array. No special tools needed.

I guess there was some data corruption on the other drives.

Sorry for your loss, been there several times myself, and lots of my customers.
 
I purchased a SANS DIGITAL TowerRAID TR4M-B and the biggest mistake I made is use the eSATA cable that came with it - it's not locking so if it's not perfectly set it could intermittent on you, so that coulda happened. Since it's software raid it has to rebuild every reboot; well, I'm thinking that if a drive orphans during the [12+ hour] rebuild you're toast, and that must've been the case. I've used RAID5 for years in multiple setups, before SATA came out I was all SCSI and never had issues. Boy, I learned my lesson this time. Since I have the DVDs, I really just lost time.
 
Azhar said:
I personally keep everything in VIDEO_TS folder structures with VOBs and all.
Click to expand...

Optimally, that would be ideal but it's not extender friendly, right? (going to try) I rip using DVD Shrink & AnyDVD. As a matter in face, I listed the steps I use to achieve WTV on this thread. Excuse the flames afterwards for going WTV and recommendations for using software that costs $$ - someone asked about WTV and I answered with what works for me.
 
bLiTzJoN said:
Optimally, that would be ideal but it's not extender friendly, right? (going to try) I rip using DVD Shrink & AnyDVD. As a matter in face, I listed the steps I use to achieve WTV on this thread. Excuse the flames afterwards for going WTV and recommendations for using software that costs $$ - someone asked about WTV and I answered with what works for me.
Click to expand...

To be honest I don't know. There's a lot more extenders than most people think, though.

http://www.iboum.com/sort/media-player-comparison-table.php

A lot of extenders have VOB support, but the question remains, would they recognize VOBs in proper play sequences in VIDEO_TS folders? That, I can't tell you.
 
I'm using UNRAID software for my NAS that currently stands at 15TB.. I have ~2,500 movies ripped on it.. This has been an ongoing project for 3+ years... My backups consists of (15) 1TB drives.. whenever I rip a movie I also copy it to a 1TB drive I have in the ripping computer .. when that drive fills up it I disconnect it and bring it over to my parents house for storage :)

I've had 2 drive failures in the 3 years.. both times UNRAID seamlessly rebuilt the drives with no down time (well i didn't write to the NAS while it was rebuilding but I could read fine).

I'm using a self written set of CGI scripts and local webserver as an interface into my movies and music.. I'm hoping someday in the future we will have enough bandwidth so I can access my movie collection and watch it anywhere I go... I can already do that with my music.

--mike
 
leemik said:
I'm using UNRAID software for my NAS that currently stands at 15TB.. I have ~2,500 movies ripped on it.. This has been an ongoing project for 3+ years... My backups consists of (15) 1TB drives.. whenever I rip a movie I also copy it to a 1TB drive I have in the ripping computer .. when that drive fills up it I disconnect it and bring it over to my parents house for storage :)

I've had 2 drive failures in the 3 years.. both times UNRAID seamlessly rebuilt the drives with no down time (well i didn't write to the NAS while it was rebuilding but I could read fine).

I'm using a self written set of CGI scripts and local webserver as an interface into my movies and music.. I'm hoping someday in the future we will have enough bandwidth so I can access my movie collection and watch it anywhere I go... I can already do that with my music.

--mike
Click to expand...

If your movies are in streaming formats (ie: mp4, m4v, etc), you can stream it over the internet (and even to your smartphones) using Winamp Orb.

On my iPhone there's about a minute and a half of initial buffering before the movie starts and it plays flawlessly (cell network permitting, of course) when streaming mp4 or m4v over Winamp Orb.
 
I've done a couple rips leaving them as VOBs and while it works great on the host, my Xbox doesn't see them at all. I downloaded Expression 3 from M$DN subscription to see how the Xbox 360 setting pans out - just curious. The settings indicate a VC-1 using WMA Pro with WMV extension. It would appear that many devices including my WD TV Live will support the format. However, doing Harry Potter is gonna take about 3 hours to encode. Ouch! But if it actually works out then I'll use the SDK and write my own service to allow unattended batch processing.
 
I like the iso format, you don't have to keep track of all the vobs, you still get to keep your menus, just load them up in a virtual dvd drive (or use mediaportal) sure they take up more space, but with 2tb HDDs being sold for 125, it isn't that big a deal these days as it used to be.
 
The guy with the unRAID has the right idea. When you add 1TB, buy 2x1TB, fill one then take it offsite, as long as you don't touch it, you'll be golden. I have 2x1TB leftover from upgrading my mirrored set to 2x2TB, I might actually do that after I get my collection restored.

I was thinking ISO directly out of AnyDVD, sure it would be a true "copy" of the original, but really, I'm happy with just the feature minus all the menus, etc... to save space.

So far I've done about 20 titles today in single VOBs with VIDEO_TS using Shrink and I'll decide what format later. They'll play on 7MC and on WD TV Live, but not on the Xbox yet.
 
jadams said:
Where is someone expected to back up 4tb of data to?
Click to expand...

Somewhere other than the RAID. I get your point, but it more of an excuse than a point. Is what you are saying that "I really can't afford or don't want to pay for to properly backup my data, so I use RAID 5 then bitch like crazy when it fails?" I should apologize for brow beating you, but honestly this excuse is getting tiring.
 
Last edited:
jadams said:
Where is someone expected to back up 4tb of data to?
Click to expand...

The cost of 2 1.5TB drives and Freenas running on an old box is many times cheaper than the time it would take me to recover and redo all of the data I have on my main file server. SyncToy echoes every thing to the Freenas box every morning at 4am. If the main server ever goes down, I'll rebuild it and then echo the data from the Freenas box. It will take a little time to transfer the data over my gigabit network, but it is still less time than reripping all of my movies, audio, etc.

Seeing as Freenas costs nothing and almost everyone has an old computer laying around that can be used as a backup file server, your only real costs are the hard drives. As someone else said, just buy two drives every time you upgrade your main server. Personally, whenever I need more space, I buy a higher density drive for the Freenas machine and then transfer the lower density drive to the main server. That keeps me a little ahead of my storage demand curve and allows me to use less actual drives in the Freenas box.

Things will get interesting when my needs exceed around 10TB, but I plan to keep the same system because reripping 10TB of movies is even more costly (timewise) than reripping 3TB.
 
Danny Bui said:
Another NAS, file server, PC, external hard drives, etc, etc.
Click to expand...

Trepidati0n said:
Somewhere other than the RAID. I get your point, but it more of an excuse than a point. Is what you are saying that "I really can't afford or don't want to pay for to properly backup my data, so I use RAID 5 then bitch like crazy when it fails?" I should apologize for brow beating you, but honestly this excuse is getting tiring.
Click to expand...

Its not an "excuse" by any means.Furthermore I dont see a single person "bitching like crazy". But a 4TB RAID is big enough as it is, and its not always economical to have ANOTHER 4TB box, whatever form factor it might be, sitting around just serving as a back up to recreational hobby such as backing up DVD's. Especially when you think about it... the RAID5 is the back up to this OP's DVD collections. SOMETIMES a RAID5 is "good enough". Guess thats not [H] enough :rolleyes:
 
Azhar said:
If your movies are in streaming formats (ie: mp4, m4v, etc), you can stream it over the internet (and even to your smartphones) using Winamp Orb.

On my iPhone there's about a minute and a half of initial buffering before the movie starts and it plays flawlessly (cell network permitting, of course) when streaming mp4 or m4v over Winamp Orb.
Click to expand...

this is why my movies are in .mp4 so that ipod/iphone can recognize them. then i use tversity to stream. i use handbrake to do all the conversion and dvd decrypter, if AnyDVD were cheaper i'd buy it.
 
leagle said:
Seeing as Freenas costs nothing and almost everyone has an old computer laying around that can be used as a backup file server
Click to expand...

Your whole argument is based on THIS assumption. NOT a good assumption to make. Besides the 10TB of space you need is going to cost you around $700 in hard drives. AGAIN not a good assumption to make that everyone has that kind of money laying around.
 
jadams said:
Your whole argument is based on THIS assumption. NOT a good assumption to make. Besides the 10TB of space you need is going to cost you around $700 in hard drives. AGAIN not a good assumption to make that everyone has that kind of money laying around.
Click to expand...

Two points:

1. The 10TB of drives that I'll need for the backup server may cost $700 (but, see point 2), but it isn't like I am shelling out $700 all at once. Using your example, it is paid out $70 at a time, over the course of a couple of years as my data storage needs slowly grow. That is not a burdensome amount of money for most people.

2. You aren't taking into account that hard drive prices will continue to drop.


In the end, it all comes down to how you value your time and your data. Figure out how many hours it would take you to recreate all of the data that you would lose without a backup. Multiply that number of hours by your hourly wage. That's close to your actual cost of recreating that data. For me, that cost is much higher than the price of a couple of hard drives and the 2 minutes it takes to set up Freenas and SyncToy.
 
leagle said:
In the end, it all comes down to how you value your time and your data. Figure out how many hours it would take you to recreate all of the data that you would lose without a backup. Multiply that number of hours by your hourly wage. That's close to your actual cost of recreating that data. For me, that cost is much higher than the price of a couple of hard drives and the 2 minutes it takes to set up Freenas and SyncToy.
Click to expand...

I agree with that but sometimes the cost isnt justifyable. Especially if you are deploying such a large backup rather than already having one in place and adding to it. A file server that can hold 10TB of data is going to cost the $700 alone on just the hard drives. The motherboard/raid controller you're going to need that will support 7-10 drives is going to be pretty costly too. Newegg shows a crappy onefor another 100 bucks, but all the others are a couple hundred. Then you need a powersupply capable of it too. And the on going cost of electricity. The cost goes beyond just the drives.

As for time. I'll glady accept $700+ to back up someones DVD collection :D.

How much of YOUR, not the computer's, time is spent ripping these things? Realistically you spend a couple seconds configurig the program then walk way. If done during normal every day use, you're not really using any time at all. Only thing you lose is downtime of collection. If you REALLY wanted to watch that one movie that you havent ripped yet then just download it off a torrent, which wouldnt be illegal if you already bought the DVD.
 
Last edited:
i dont back up movies. if i lose a movie, i just get it again or re-rip it myself. Its not like you cant get a movie anytime you want with the internet.

Im not advocating piracy, but kids wreck DVDs.

I do backup football games. Thats a lot of space and stuff you cant really get again.
 
TheResidentEvil said:
i dont back up movies. if i lose a movie, i just get it again or re-rip it myself. Its not like you cant get a movie anytime you want with the internet.

Im not advocating piracy, but kids wreck DVDs.

I do backup football games. Thats a lot of space and stuff you cant really get again.
Click to expand...

Holy crap, you are my twin. I backup my football matches to an external USB drive but could give a crap about the movies for the exact reason you mention.
 
I have about 50 or so rips so far (structured like Azhar's) and decided a good time to start building up MyMovies Database. I went into the config to do some adjustments to the cover display, backdrop, etc.. Well, I noticed a lil Transcoding checkbox and I happen to have enough points to enable the feature. Fired up my Xbox and sure enough movies are streaming!! I look at the standard Movie Library listing and it's completely empty, but My Movies has them and will play just fine!! I'm set with simple DVD rips, no encoding necessary. I noticed the quality is not spectacular (widescreen movies are crammed into a 4:3 box with black bars on top, but 4:3 movies fill like normal with black side bars, I can zoom to fill), but it should get me by till I can get another HTPC built. Scanning and skipping works if enough is buffered.

Update: I just watched Antz with the kids and it filled the whole screen. I think the bars issue with some movies may be cause I've downloaded a 4:3 entry when the rip was widescreen so it treated it as fullscreen transcoding. Not sure, but I wanted to make a note that it works with proper screen fill. This is great!
 
Last edited:
I took a moment to install Winamp Remote and give it a whirl. It looks promising; unfortunately, for me all the movies listed go by the filename; so they were all "VTS_01_1". LOL *initiating uninstall*
 
jadams said:
Its not an "excuse" by any means.Furthermore I dont see a single person "bitching like crazy". But a 4TB RAID is big enough as it is, and its not always economical to have ANOTHER 4TB box, whatever form factor it might be, sitting around just serving as a back up to recreational hobby such as backing up DVD's. Especially when you think about it... the RAID5 is the back up to this OP's DVD collections. SOMETIMES a RAID5 is "good enough". Guess thats not [H] enough :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

I think Trepidati0n's "bitching like crazy" remark was probably referring to the OP's rather "bitching" remark of "Word of Wisedom: Never use RAID5!". It is a bit ignorant, a small complaint, and whiny, typical of "bitching". Either that or Trepidati0n referring to past cases here on the forum where someone has a failed RAID 5 array losing all of data, Then they starts whining about how RAID 5 was suppose to be the end all to storage expansion capability and backup needs.

Anyway, leagle said it right: "In the end, it all comes down to how you value your time and your data." As this very thread has shown, the value of data varies from person to person. Yes, some people can't afford or don't want to pay to have a backup of all their data. Yes the cost isn't justifiable sometimes but that does vary from person to person as well. Even the prices and costs you talk about are just a drop in the hat for some people.

So in other words, do whatever you want with your data. If you can afford to back it up all up, do it. If you can't, hope for the best and back up the most critical data. And finally: generally RAID, by itself, is not backup.
 
To me bitching constitutes re-iterating the same issue which has an obvious solution but being obtuse. When somebody says "how do I backup X data", the answer is "with an X sized backup". While this question is valid for somebody with a novice user with a simple PC, it is not valid for a person who is already dealing with 4TB+ of data.

Backing up data is within everyones control. If you cannot afford to backup 100% of the data you have then you either need to reduce the amount of data you have or be prepared to lose part or all of it. It is a choice. bLiTzJoN learned from that decision, but it looks like the only thing he "lost" was something he could replace.
 
Danny Bui said:
And finally: generally RAID, by itself, is not backup.
Click to expand...

I never considered my RAID setups to be "backups", but was shocked at how redundant [lack thereof] RAID 5 was for me. For family photos, videos and such I did not store them on that array; I have a mirrored set with an external USB hard drive for redundancy and backup. The backup for my RAID 5 was simply keeping the original DVDs boxed up and not pawning them off; therefore, I'm out of time to recreate it. Since I'm not encoding them to WTV it's not taking so long to rebuild providing I can keep my wife from watching TV.

Summarizing many statements on this thread, I didn't intend my Word of Wisedom to be a bitching remark; however, it doesn't surprise me on this forum to be taken any which way since there are all sorts of folks from many different walks of life. To which his or her own, I don't let it get to me; some idiot has to make the remark or question to get answers for the proudful that need it but too chicken to ask for fear of flames - I'll play the idiot this time. ;)
 
It's like insurance.. you can choose it have it or not to have it.. I personally choose to spend the extra $70 because it took me 3 years to get it to the point where I am now and I don't wanna spend another 3 years rebuilding it if something goes wrong.. computer storage is not bulletproof.. it's actually very fragile when you think about it..
 
leemik said:
It's like insurance.. you can choose it have it or not to have it.. I personally choose to spend the extra $70 because it took me 3 years to get it to the point where I am now and I don't wanna spend another 3 years rebuilding it if something goes wrong.. computer storage is not bulletproof.. it's actually very fragile when you think about it..
Click to expand...

I agree. It took me a year to almost the day (4/15/09 is when I ordered the parts for the HTPC) to get my collection ripped to the point I was at when I lost it; however, there was a lot of trial and error and encoding time involved. I'm thankful with the help of fine folks contributing even on this thread that I'm on the path of something greater. I was looking to re-encode all the WTVs to another format and quite honestly I'm glad I'm re-ripping from the originals in the end.
 
I'm about half-way restored. Rips are going pretty quick and, again, I have sure saved a lot of time not having to encode. It's amazing how much extra bloat WTV adds to files, I'm saving a lot of space!
 
While I have several TB of ripped DVDs, I think a better way is to simply have a large number of DVD drives.

I think I would rip movies that I watch (listen to mostly) at least once a week or once a month. Use the DVD drives to que up a set of DVDs for special occasions. Use AnyDVD to get rid of the menus.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top