Hey guys, I am currently thinking about backing up my entire blu-ray collection (only about 15 or so!) but I needed to know a couple things first. How big can I expect each movie to ultimately be. I only want the 1080p video and the accompanying hd audio be it truehd or master hd etc. I want to maintain the native video and audio - no compressing if possible. I have been looking at a couple hdd bays and was hoping that i could just store my files on one of the many drives and then access them on my ps3/apple tv as required. Thanks for any assistance.
If you rip just the movie and audio, and remove all the extras, then it's going to be about 24Gb in size per film, if you use BD Rebuilder, then you can drop the size down to that of single or double layer DVD.
hmm. ok thanks. so really right now there is not a practical way of storing hundreds of potential blu ray titles other then buying something like a drobo and loading it with 1.5tb hard drives correct?
A 1TB drive willl allow you to easily store 110+ movies using the method I suggested (choosing DVD-9 format)or nearly 200 movies at DVD-5 format. That seems pretty practical to me. Theres also no reason why you can't use a 1TB drive inside a PC to start with, and then just stream from there. As stated, there are now 2TB drives coming out, and 1.5TB drives are easy to get hold of. Obviously you don't get 1000GB of data on a 1TB drive, more like 932GB.
o wow, i had no idea 2gb were available yet. i guess my whole thing was trying to keep all the movies at their native quality which through some research appears to be approx 22-25gb per movie. bigdk, the method your suggesting obviously involves some form of compression no? thanks again for all the help.
It does need compression, you can download the software free to do it, (AnyDVD HD will need to be purchased) but you'd need that anyway to backup any BD movie. The following thread explains some of it, I've just tried it for the first time and can confirm the results are very very good. http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/733781 If you already use DVD RB, you'll know what the results on DVD are like, they surpase anything obtained from more basic programs such as shrink or recode. Best to give it a try, the worst case for you would be that the results weren't up to your standards, but by still using the same program, you could at least remove all the extras and just keep the main film. Chances are, you'll be surprised at the results and see it as a viable method of backup, I couldn't see any difference on that film from the original. Only downside of this, is the processing power and time needed to do the encoding. It took me about 7 hours to encode Kung Fu panda from the ripped content on the HDD to DVD-9 format, that was with a q6600 and 4gb ram on Vista 32, I could probably get that down by OCing the system again, but its all at stock ATM. If you started now with only a few films in your collection, then you can just run an encode over night each time you get a new film.
