[wintermute115]

I'm planning on setting up a media centre (principally so that I can get my 600+ DVDs off the shelves), and XBMC looks like being the best way to go, but I have a few questions before I start paying for hardware. Apologies if these have been answered elsewhere; I looked (though probably not very thoroughly) for appropriate threads, but feel free to point me to any I missed.

I already have my collection catalogued in DVDProfiler; would it be possible to draw metadata from DVDProfiler's database? Has anyone tried this? Failing that, how easy is it to set up metadata? What sources does it draw from?

As hard drives are probably going to end up being the most expensive part of this, what format do you recommend ripping DVDs to? The manual mentions RAR-compressed ISOs, which sounds like a good option to me, unless people have other recommendations? How much room would you expect a (non-HD) movie to take up in this format? Also, what tools do you suggest for ripping ISO images? Windows' native tools won't let me copy DVDs, as they're encrypted, and I can't find any third-party tools that will let me test them out before I pay for them. My library is a mixture of R1 and R2 disks, if that affects tools that can be used.

I have a test installation on my computer, so I can get a feel for the interface, but I'm finding it difficult to get a feel for how the library works without having actual files in there at the moment; is it possible for me to be able to play with library structures and see how much freedom I have to arrange things as I want before I start actually ripping DVDs?

Thanks very much for your help; it's greatly appreciated and I loom forward to setting this up properly.

[FlimtotheFlam]

With this size of your DVD collection I think it would be foolish to rip to ISO's. At a minimum of 4.7 GB x 600 = 3+ TB of Data. With a library of that size I would recommend encoding to Xvid with a DVD size around 1.2 GB's. I use FaireUse Wizard 2. It is a good multipurpose DVD ripper that is quick and easy to use.

Not sure about DVD Profiler but here should be a start

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=22520

[ShortySco]

The library mode is great.

If you wanna mess around with the library, create some text files and rename them to Die Hard.avi, or .iso, or .rar and it should pick them up.

The info in the library comes from scrapers, you can with some learning create your own scraper to get info from wherever, i guess maybe even DVD profiler (a guess!) but the existing ones are great and for movies IMDB is the default scraper.

You can also make a nfo file to go alongside each movie (Die Hard.nfo) and this is just a text file containing either a direct link to the imdb page or the movie info itself (Check out XBMC media companion)

Personally i like my media as the previous poster said, in xvid/divx format, i'd say around 500mb per hour should give great DVD-like quality. But to keep the bonus features i'd use a program (don't remember it's name though) to remove unwanted features and soudtracks and reduce the size of my dvd images.

Hope that helps!

Shorty

P.S. Check out the XBMC wiki, lots of info there.

[wintermute115]

Thanks for your replies.

Storage is cheap (especially compared to the DVDs themselves - maybe an extra $1 per disk?), and I was expecting to need a handful of terabyte drives to handle my collection, so I'm leaning towards keeping full ISOs, I think. I'll look into divX, though.

I've got my test install to catalogue my CD collection, and I'm impressed how the library managed with that - misspelled artists don't seem to phase it at all, but it doesn't seem to be entirely successful at finding the right cover art...

I'll try setting up some dummy movies tonight, and see how I can get it to work. The DVD Profiler script you linked to looks interesting, and I'm looking forward to playing with that.

I'm getting more and more confident that XBMC is the tool I want to be using. Thanks.

[ShortySco]

Yeah, if space/cash is no problem, keeping full iso's is the way to go.

Shorty

[wintermute115]

Hrm. Reading through what the wiki says about TV shows, it looks like there'd be some gain in encoding them on a per-episode basis, rather than per-disk. But would doing this let me keep convenient access to commentary tracks, deleted scenes, etc?

[ShortySco]

You could have it as such, but it would involve quite some work i'd say...

You can have multiple audio tracks to a file you rip, so thats no problem.
You could rip deleted scenes, trailers... etc separately and get them into the library via nfo files, they would appear under "Specials"

Don't think you'd have a way to get the dvd menu navigation though, but the library interface in XBMC is convenient and consistant across all TV shows.

Perhaps someone else has a better way?

Shorty

[Gamester17]

Hrm. Reading through what the wiki says about TV shows, it looks like there'd be some gain in encoding them on a per-episode basis, rather than per-disk. But would doing this let me keep convenient access to commentary tracks, deleted scenes, etc?

You can do with or.

Leaving them as full ISO discs would be the less amount of work but will not be as smooth integration as pressing play on any of the episoden on that disc will bring up the DVD-menu and you have to choose the episode again. To archive this simply name the ISO image to "S01E01-02-03-04" (for season 1 and episodes 1 to 4).

If you split them up (re-encoding them or not), you keep the multiple language audio streams and commentary tracks, embedded subtitles, etc. by selecting a container format that support those, (I suggest MKV/Matroska). For deleted scenes, and other 'specials' you create a separate "Season 0" (then you will need look/enter under season "0" at TheTVDB.com what episode number to give each 'special' clip (season 'zero' again being such specials).