Wayne Williams shows you how to clear your living room of DVD clutter and bring your movie collection into the 21st Century
It’s a familiar sight in living rooms everywhere: towering stacks of DVDs littered around the TV, from muchloved movies and current favourites to birthday box sets and friends’ recommendations that are yet to be watched. While DVDs take up less space than chunky old video cassettes, they still clutter up shelves and cupboards, and the chances are that you only watch them infrequently. In this issue’s Weekend Project, we’ll show you how to kill two birds with one stone by freeing up space and making your movie collection more accessible.
Rip your DVDs
If you want to move your DVD collection out of the living room and into the loft or garage, or simply sell or bin the discs, it makes sense to rip the DVDs so you have a digital copy that you can watch whenever the mood strikes. There are lots of free programs you can use for the task, including popular conversion tools such as Freemake Video Converter (www.freemake.com, but take care to decline any unwanted extras during installation).
You can rip your discs to a range of formats, although we'd recommend Matroska Video - or MKV, as it’s more commonly known. This is a container format that can store numerous video, audio and subtitle tracks, as well as any metadata. Of course, it’s only worth ripping to this format if the device you’re going to play it on can handle it. PCs will have no problem and most modern standalone media players support the format. It’s only older devices that may not recognise it.
Assuming MKV is a format that works for you, the best free ripping tool is probably MakeMKV (www.makemkv.com). As well as converting DVDs into MKV video files, it can also rip Blu-rays, if you have a Blu-ray drive in (or attached to) your PC. The program is available for both Windows and Mac OS X. See our Mini Workshop, below, to find out how to use it to rip your discs.
Other tools worth considering include WinX DVD Ripper Free Edition (bit.ly/winx376), Format Factory (www.pcfreetime.com) and the open-source StaxRip (bit.ly/stax376). There are also plenty of commercial disc rippers available to buy, including AnyDVD (around £35 from www.slysoft.com) and Any DVD Converter Pro (£21.48 from bit.ly/anydvd376). While these offer some additional features, most people will be better off sticking with free software.
Where to store your movie collection
The obvious place to store your ripped DVDs is on your PC’s hard drive. Y ou will need a sizable drive to hold them all and you might want to back up your favourites in case of drive failure (although if you keep the original DVDs, you can simply rip them again). You could also buy or make your own HTPC (Home Theatre PC) just for storing and playing movies - OSMC for the Raspberry Pi (osmc.tv) is a cheap option, though you’ll need to store your ripped DVDs on an external USB drive.
Other storage options include a NAS (Network Attached Storage) drive, so your movies can be streamed to any device from anywhere, including over the internet. You can buy ready-made NAS devices that attach to your router, or make your own using FreeNAS (web.freenas.org).
There are also portable media drives, such as the Seagate Wireless (£95 from www.ebuyer.com). This is a battery-powered 500GB drive with a built-in wireless network that can stream movies to up to three smartphones, tablets and laptops simultaneously.
If you have a Blu-ray writer in your PC, you can burn multiple ripped DVDs to a single Blu-ray disc, or save your favourite movies on a USB memory drive. Most modern standalone Blu-ray and DVD players have a USB port and can play movies from a memory stick. Check your player’s manual to find out if your make and model can do this.
Useful software
Media Player software provides a useful front end for a movie collection stored on a PC. If you’re running Windows 7, you can use the built-in Windows Media Center (though this isn't available in Windows 10). There are several other decent free alternatives including Kodi (kodi.tv, which was formerly known as XBMC) and MediaPortal (www.team-mediaportal.com). Web User had a round-up of these programs in Issue 372 (bit.ly/issue372).
Plex (plex.tv) is a powerful media server that lets you stream movies stored on a central location (a PC or NAS) to any device on your network. You can buy an app if you’d like to use it on your smartphone or tablet.
A program for cataloguing your movie collection will also come in very handy. One of the best tools for the job is Data Crow (www.datacrow.net) which can manage and organise any kind of media, including books, software, images, music tracks and movies. Select the Movie module, then add your collection to it. The program offers loads of advanced features.
Finally, if you don’t want to manually rename individually ripped files (as well as movies you’ve sourced from other locations), you can use FileBot (www.filebot.net) to organise and rename them for you. It automatically matches your files with data pulled from the web and lets you choose how your files should be named.
Is it legal to rip DVDs?
In October 2014, it was finally made legal for UK residents to rip CDs and DVDs for personal use. Prior to that, creating a copy of your own discs - ripping audio CDs to add your music to iTunes, for example - was against copyright law. However, you still can’t rip discs that you don’t own - such as those belonging to friends - and you can’t rip and convert DVDs wrapped in DRM, for watching on an iPad or Android devices.
While it was great to see some common sense prevail with the updated law, there have been some new complications. At one point, it seemed possible that the UK courts might relax the restriction over making personal copies of DRM-protected media, but in a judicial review sparked by an appeal from the music industry, the High Court struck down the government’s new law because there was no compulsory system for compensating copyright holders who might have been “harmed” by the copying. Quite how a copyright holder would be harmed by someone making a personal copy of something they’ve already paid for is anyone’s guess but, as it stands at the time of writing, it’s still illegal to rip DVDs, although you’re unlikely to get into trouble for doing so.