I want to digitalize my entire DVD collection. I'm a purist in many ways, and the idea of shrinking a DVD rip to a "reasonable" file size would annoy me. I'm considering buying like two terabyte externals, and just ripping the full ISOs of the DVDs, most are like 4-5 gigs, so doing the math I figure I can fit everything on two terabyte drives. I'm looking for opinions on this strategy. I can't really see why it wouldn't work, yet somehow I feel that it might be a waste of time / misguided.
Yes you can save in a ISO, it's a safe format that can be worked with. You can unpack it like a RAR file. If you want to shrink it some more you can mount it with daemon tools and use dvdshrink. And vlc media player can play the ISO directly on your computer.
I save my dvd's on ISO, but since I only like the main movie, I always shrink it down to size. That way I can just use nero to burn it to dvd, and since my favorite xvid converter only converts ISO's it's convenient for me.
I've started doing what you just suggested a while back.. But man does a drive fill up fast. What I like about the full 4-5 gig iso is the ease of burning it back onto a disc when needed and the fact that the quality is still top notch (or better than your average 700 meg avi anyways..)
If you use Nero Recode to convert them to h.264, you can achieve at least 2x shrink from the original DVD before the difference becomes perceptible even for a videophile.
If you're a purist, consider switching to Blu-Ray, which has a quality close to that of the studio masters. DVD video is over ten years old and is about where VHS was when DVD was relatively new.
