Digital Storage and Play DVD's

[SailtheWind]

Originally Posted by Wideocean7

Hi All

I've read some older posts on this and wonder if anyone has found a more recent clever solution?

I'm moving onto my yacht mid-2021 and have around 100 DVD movies that I'd like to store digitally and play onboard. To save space I'd very much rather not have to keep the hard-copies. A great solution would be a box to store the movies (perhaps downloaded via my laptop?) and the same box being able to play back to a TV via an MDMI or other cable.

Does anyone with better knowledge of this stuff than I have any suggestions?

Cheers

Some others have already offered great advise. I am sharing what I did on our sailboat a couple of years ago. Very happy with the setup and no issues.

What you are planning to do is fairly simple. I have ripped my entire collection of over 500 DVD and blue ray onto a 2Tb HDD. This is legal as long as you have the original DVD and on play it for your own pleasure. No selling tickets to the cruisers in the anchorage.

At home I have nearly 8feet of shelving for the DVD, on the boat I have a hard drive behind the TV that is about 4 x 3 x .5 inches.

The Hard drive is secured by Velcro on the back of the smart TV (Samsung 32” that is the biggest I could fit in entertainment center in the saloon). The HDD drive is connected to the TV via a USB 3.0 cable. When I want to see a movie I select source which gives me options Air TV, Cable TV and Hard drive. Once the hard drive is visible, select a movie and it will play on the TV. Simple. No additional player required it’s built in the Smart TV.

While the process is simple, the ripping takes time, a long time. The way I did it is started the ripping process and walked away, and every time I walked by the den I put a new DVD to be ripped. It took me a couple of weeks to do the entire collection. Because of the length of time it took to copy the collection I also have a second hard drive in reserve with a full copy
just in case the first HDD crashes.

The software I used is sold by Leawo. Cost two years ago was $89 they recently were selling the new one for 59.95

https://www.leawo.net/

The product works as advertised and should you come across an issue copying a particular DVD their help desk will respond with a solution within a day or two. (I had one issue out of 500+ DVD, and they resolved it)

Hard drive from Amazon $63.00 each. With only 100 DVD you might be able to use a 1 Tb. They are a little bit cheaper around $46.00. I really recommend the Western Digital. I have another one at the navigation station for my charts and that unit has been on the boat for over three years without any issues.

https://tinyurl.com/yyt68mek

Television. I have a Samsung 32-inch Smart LED TV onboard but the above system will work with any smart TV.

https://tinyurl.com/y5jxsm4m

Power
To power the TV I use an AIMS 150 Watt Power Inverter Cost $28.00. The TV only draw 33 watt so you could buy a 100 watt power inverter but they are more expensive than the 150 watt. Go figure

https://tinyurl.com/y362fd3q


Good luck setting up your system

[duckpond49]

Originally Posted by Wideocean7

Thanks Guys. I know I can play a DVD from my laptop (via internal or external storage) and an HDMI cable to the TV but am wondering if there is a product that can not only store the DVD's but can also play them back to the TV? If it even exists, I would imagine in the first place that I'd need to save the DVD's via my laptop to the memory on my imagined device?

Maybe wishful thinking!

This is an amazing time to be alive! You can store up to 250 2 hour movies on a terabyte of solid state memory. That solid state drive can be powered off USB (3.0). No AC needed. A 5 Terabyte drive can be bought for around $130 at a big box office or electronics store. That's something like 2500 hours of movies. The bad news is it just might take what seems like forever to get all your movies rounded up and onto that drive.

[neflier]

Originally Posted by sailcrazy

Also, I would be very interested in getting those "boat movie" settings for HANDBRAKE. I've never used that program, but since you have already sorted it out it would be good to have for future use. Thanks

There was some trial and error to get these settings. My goal was to take a digital copy of a movie and strip out what isn't needed on a boat, such as foreign language tracks, extras, commentaries and the high end audio tracks (my home is 7.1, the boat is stereo) and compress it so there is no loss of quality when viewed on a smaller tv.

You want the subtitle options shown. This will only show subtitles when appropriate, such as the English subtitles for the Russian dialogue in Hunt for Red October.

Try it first on a few movies to ensure the final output is compatible with your player, then you can run a batch conversion on an entire collection and let it go for however long it takes. Mine was about three weeks.

With these settings you should get about 500 movies on a 512GB USB drive.

[Simi 60]

Originally Posted by duckpond49

This is an amazing time to be alive! You can store up to 250 2 hour movies on a terabyte of solid state memory. .

Compress them correctly with handbrake and get 1000 + movies on 1tb

[j.g.evans]

I have ripped protected DVD movies using DVD Shrink. This program will then copy the movie to a blank DVD, but, the digital file on the computer can be used directly in perhaps ALC. This program was purged from the US internet by the movie industry, but, copies may be around from cruisers or Europe. My computer will not read Blu Ray DVDs so I don't know if DVD Shrink will be useful for them. I don't know about MakeMKV or Handbrake and am surprised they have not been banned too.

[lhuff35204]

I did this too before moving onto our boat.

I ripped the dvds to a 1 TB hard drive using "Handbrake" https://forums.plex.tv/t/dvd-rip-to-...brary/219401/2

Purchased an Intel NUC PC and added the hard drive
https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Mainstr...s%2C321&sr=8-3

Then Installed Plex Media Sever on the PC and pointed it to the DVD media folder and moved all of my movies and audio to it
https://www.plex.tv/your-media/
https://www.plex.tv/media-server-downloads/

The Plex Server matched the media to its database: adds posters, ratings, and synopsis and looks a lot like Prime Video.

[neflier]

We have the Plex media Server with our home theater and I agree it's an excellent solution, but it does add another level of complexity and additional functionality. It's nice to have all these different options.

[mitiempo]

Originally Posted by j.g.evans

I have ripped protected DVD movies using DVD Shrink. This program will then copy the movie to a blank DVD, but, the digital file on the computer can be used directly in perhaps ALC. This program was purged from the US internet by the movie industry, but, copies may be around from cruisers or Europe. My computer will not read Blu Ray DVDs so I don't know if DVD Shrink will be useful for them. I don't know about MakeMKV or Handbrake and am surprised they have not been banned too.

DVD Shrink is available from multiple sources. This explains all about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Shrink

[Chotu]

I’m looking to have a media server. Haven’t had one since the 1990s.

Looking to rip dvds onto it and store a bunch of mp3s too.

I’d like to connect this media server (just a drive??) to the boat’s WiFi network and stream audio and video in the boat in this fashion.

What would one use these days for this? I’d hope to be able to stream these files to our iPhones and also to a projector we’d like to use as a tv, possibly from iPhone, through hdmi cable to projector.

What would you use for the network storage device that can be accessed through the local boat WiFi network and used to view on an iPhone?

[landsend]

Download the movies, think pirate bay etc.

Store on 5 TB hard drive.
Play via your lap top. VLC is great.

[Pizzazz]

I have been through the process a few times, let me give you some pointers. There is a learning curve. You need to learn how to rip and convert movies and apply the process to the few rare DVDs that you probably own. Use handbrake, it is an excellent program. You want each movie to be around 5 GB for good quality but it will be compressed differently than DVDs. Use x264 for best compatibility. The you need a few hard drives, say five x 1TB each or whatever is cheapest. Then you need either a good TV to play or a small stand alone player with a good remote. Having a NUC has many benefits. Playing off the laptop is PITA. Once you get the process under control, stop and look around.

Most of the movies you can download from various sites, professionally ripped with good subtitles. Then you can exchange hard drives with other fellow sailors (this is why you need a few of those). You can also backup your music and pictures to the drives, multiple times. Soon you will have more movies and decades of season of popular series than you can possibly watch. Plex is a good organizer to learn.

Also, do not underestimate the streaming services. You can download significant number of movies and TV series at your ports of call and they will be available for 21 days or so while at sea.

Around where I live, you can download at approx. 1 GB/min which gives you 5 min per movie. It is a lot faster than the ripping process. Just make sure you own the DVD in staorage .

[Wideocean7]

Great info everyone. Thanks very much.

Unless I mis-read the advice, the simplest solution seems to be:

1. Buy a 2TB hard drive or WD Ultra Fit 500 GB 3.1 USB/flash/thumb drive for storage
2. Download Handbreak (for DVD ripping), Make MKV (for BlueRay ripping) and DVD Fab/DVD Shrink (for copy protected ripping)
3. Rip and save onto HD/thumb drive
4. Buy a smart TV (probably 240v via inverter)with USB port that can play the media files directly from the HD/thumb drive

Have I got the sum of it for a simple solution? I only want to be able to play on a TV.

Cheers

[Simi 60]

Originally Posted by Wideocean7

Great info everyone. Thanks very much.

Unless I mis-read the advice, the simplest solution seems to be:

1. Buy a 2TB hard drive or WD Ultra Fit 500 GB 3.1 USB/flash/thumb drive for storage
2. Download Handbreak (for DVD ripping), Make MKV (for BlueRay ripping) and DVD Fab/DVD Shrink (for copy protected ripping)
3. Rip and save onto HD/thumb drive
4. Buy a smart TV (probably 240v via inverter)with USB port that can play the media files directly from the HD/thumb drive

Have I got the sum of it for a simple solution? I only want to be able to play on a TV.

Cheers

Don't need a smart TV
Our dumb TV plays mp4 and AVI via a USB or HDMI port
If you want to get an actual media library going, various media boxes/mini pc are on eBay for $50

We have been using this for a couple of years now.

https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/2019-MXQ...edirect=mobile

[Macblaze]

Originally Posted by Wideocean7

Great info everyone. Thanks very much.

Unless I mis-read the advice, the simplest solution seems to be:

1. Buy a 2TB hard drive or WD Ultra Fit 500 GB 3.1 USB/flash/thumb drive for storage
2. Download Handbreak (for DVD ripping), Make MKV (for BlueRay ripping) and DVD Fab/DVD Shrink (for copy protected ripping)
3. Rip and save onto HD/thumb drive
4. Buy a smart TV (probably 240v via inverter)with USB port that can play the media files directly from the HD/thumb drive

Have I got the sum of it for a simple solution? I only want to be able to play on a TV.

Cheers

Handbrake will rip copy protected dvds with the right driver (libdvdcss) and afaik it will handle Bluray just fine.

[CatDreamin]

Setting up a media server like Plex is what I am going to do. You can just rip your dvds and save them media files then play on the plex app. You can set up the plex server to not need to stream over internet so you are not reliant on that. Then you can play from any device (TV, Phone, Tablet, Laptop) that connects to your server.