Yes, it’s illegal in this country. I know that. But, to be honest, I don’t care. I’m not doing it to make illegal copies or anything, I’m doing it because I want to have a great Home Cinema setup. So far I’ve ripped about 50 DVD’s that were lying around the house using DVD43 and DVD Shrink. There are a couple of stuborn titles that required AnyDVD instead but for the most part it’s been a successful venture. Any films I get from my subscription service also get ripped rather than watched immediately.

A 1TB dedicated hard drive can hold around 200 titles. When I finally get round to purchasing or building a Windows Home Server, endless expandable storage will be available for just the cost of a new disk thanks to the way WHS handles drive space. Instead of individual drives showing up as C:, D:, E: etc it bundles them all together and the combined capacity of your 3 (or however many drives) shows up as C:. It’s not as dangerous as RAID-0, as individual folders (such as your DVD folder!) can be set to ‘duplicate’, and WHS will then store your rips on more than 1 of the drives. If one of the drives fails, just pop in a new one and WHS will rebuild. Super duper.

The problem I’m now facing is keeping track of what I’ve already ripped, what we already own on DVD and so on. I’m pondering setting up a new service to do precisely this, that will be available to everyone on the net. It’ll integrate (one day) with the NetFlix API so you can ‘authorize’ my service to add titles to your queue from just a button push from you, e.g. the “Top 10″ titles on my service you go down and think “Yeah, I want to see that!”, one click and it’s in your queue. The same for LoveFiLM users in the UK (when they finally finish their API).

Fun times ahead!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 3:48 pm and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.