Converting Physical Media to Digital

[Vince, Pt. II]

So I've been trying to think a little outside the box for some Christmas gifts this year, and my parents are going through a big remodel of their house. They own hundreds of DVDs and CDs (easily over a thousand combined), and they take up a pretty large footprint currently. Converting these collections to digital would be a tremendous help for them, and I know they don't even realize it's a possibility.

I know how to handle the CDs (this thread is helpful), but the DVDs (and Blu-Rays) are a different matter.

Anything I have found on the web seems to be years old (some of these are a decade old), and most imply a huge time investment - one said that each Blu-Ray would take 30 minutes to rip, and that's before converting it to a readable digital format, which they recommended cracking a beer and watching one of the movies you've already finished working on while it goes.

Does anyone have any experience / advice / guidance on whether or not this is a feasible project? I don't actually need to be finished before Christmas; as long as there is some progress it can be an ongoing thing. But if we're talking multiple hours per DVD, I might not be able to stomach the work.

[sovereignstar v2]

I'm pretty versed in ripping media, though I don't do it much anymore for obvious reasons. I think makemkv can bypass copyright protection and convert to mkv for most bluray and DVD discs in 30-60m, the question is how are you expecting your parents to watch digital media? Personally, I have my own file server and run Plex, but it's not something for the weak and requires quite a bit of work on your part. I can try to answer any questions you might have, but I can't tell you anything other than it will be quite an investment in time.

[Vince, Pt. II]

Good point. My pie-in-the-sky idea would be to set up a dummy media server on their network. I've got my old PC collecting dust here at my place, and it would be a pretty simple thing to drop a large HD or two in it and just make it a glorified storage device with network access. I think the hardest thing would be setting it up so that they can access it without having to jump through a bunch of hoops.

[sovereignstar v2]

Have you ever ran Plex or Kodi, yourself? Those are probably going to be your two best options. I'm sure you can figure out the server/laptop side in your instance pretty easily. Are your parents ready to use the client apps for either of those two? Do they have streaming devices?

[sovereignstar v2]

How many DVDs and blurays do they have by the way?

[Vince, Pt. II]

Several hundred DVDs (somewhere in the 300-600 range). I do not know how many of them are Bluray.

They have an Apple TV they use regularly, and they use Netflix/Comcast to stream things. I have not run Kodi or Plex myself.

[Drake]

If they're like my mother-in-law, they likely purchased every major studio release available at Wal-Mart for two full decades.

[sovereignstar v2]

Originally Posted by Vince, Pt. II

Several hundred DVDs (somewhere in the 300-600 range). I do not know how many of them are Bluray.

They have an Apple TV they use regularly, and they use Netflix/Comcast to stream things. I have not run Kodi or Plex myself.

So yeah, that amount of discs is absolutely going to be a timesink. You also need a bluray reader to burn the bluray discs. 300 discs at a very conservative 20 minutes a pop would be 100 hours.

[Vince, Pt. II]

That's an acceptable time sink to me, I'll look into it further. May send you a PM here shortly.

[stevew]

I think realistically you could start with stuff they're going to watch and then move forward with the rest of the stuff.

[RainMaker]

Has anyone converted a bunch of old photos to digital?

[Suicane75]

I have. This is me in 1979. Eat your heart out Mr. Jenner.

[bob]

If they have a recent TV, it might have a USB port or two. You could always get an external HD filled with the movies and connect that to the TV to remove the need from streaming from a server PC. My 5 year old Vizio TV has this.

[Kodos]

Originally Posted by Vince, Pt. II

Several hundred DVDs (somewhere in the 300-600 range). I do not know how many of them are Bluray.

They have an Apple TV they use regularly, and they use Netflix/Comcast to stream things. I have not run Kodi or Plex myself.

What about a lo-fi solution for the DVDs/Blu-rays? Throw out the cases, and just keep the discs in a series of alphabetized DVD wallets.

[sovereignstar v2]

Originally Posted by bob

If they have a recent TV, it might have a USB port or two. You could always get an external HD filled with the movies and connect that to the TV to remove the need from streaming from a server PC. My 5 year old Vizio TV has this.

That's a good point bob, something I hadn't considered. The downside would be that the UI will be very rudimentary and it won't be pretty. It would save Vince some time though. It might be worth starting out a project like this, then doing a client/server type of thing on the side.

[bob]

Originally Posted by sovereignstar v2

That's a good point bob, something I hadn't considered. The downside would be that the UI will be very rudimentary and it won't be pretty. It would save Vince some time though. It might be worth starting out a project like this, then doing a client/server type of thing on the side.

Yeah, the UI would likely be poor, but maybe that's improved some lately on newer devices. My device only shows 20 items per page by alphabetical order, but it works for us since we just use a 64GB flash drive with at most 100 items total.

[Vince, Pt. II]

Good suggestion, I'll take a look at the TV the next time I'm there. A big consideration for this is "likelihood that they can break the system." Like I said, they're no technophobes, but they manage to screw things up in spectacular ways sometimes. And the last thing I want is to have to be 24/7 tech support.

[stevew]

Isn't there a way to rip them to Itunes

[sovereignstar v2]

Originally Posted by stevew

Isn't there a way to rip them to Itunes

Can't imagine iTunes has the capability to bypass the copyright protection on all of the discs.