The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

for a 1080p rip with 5.1 audio 15gb is the max I would go personally.

store them on a hdd and stream to my tv, ironically using a BR player haha.

the only BRs I own are the planet earth series.

I just wish this HDD thing didn't happen for a month or so. Was planning a big hdd upgrade (well, small for you sam, but big otherwise lol)

oh and TV 720p rips having 6 channel audio would be nice

 

Most of my 1080p rips are some 6-9GB and look fine on my TV. Ofc the 15GB rip is going to have better quality but considering it's already HD I'm just nitpicking. I usually go for middling quality rips vs high quality ones due entirely to storage space. The vast majority of my collection is 720p rips at 5GB and under and they honestly look fine.

 

how's the sound quality?

 

More or less fine. I've had a few with terrible sound for some odd reason, but the vast majority seem to have the typical high bitrate audio. 320kb/s and up usually. A few in particular sound just crap, and even fewer still strangely have only stereo audio... But yeah nothing really notable. Past about 1000kb/s I can't really tell the difference.

 

Then you must be burning discs because if reliability is FIRST then optical media would be your choice!

Blu-ray players are cheap and media isn't bad either and if you are smart it doesn't take a lot of space to save backups either, like Sam and Creaky might want you to believe.

If simplicity and laziness is first than hard drives are the way to go however borrowing your movies to someone else or just bringing a movie to a friends becomes problematic. I like using both which provides me the best of both worlds and backups are not a problem because I buy my movies and back them up as I go, not a major pain.

 

Well, if a great amount of data storage is needed, within a reasonable size, available on demand, hard disks are the only option. The lazy option, without data available on demand, using reduced storage space in a larger physical size, is optical media. Burning discs is a relatively thoughtless process, but it's slow, the discs can't be erased (unless you buy expensive ones), and you can't easily flick through to find specific data. Hard disks may take longer to set up, but are by far the more efficient solution to actually use. They're much quicker to transfer data around, can be erased/rewritten as often as you like, and all the data is available all the time, assuming all the disks are attached to the PC.
It's easy to see why people prefer optical media for small collections, as generally speaking quality discs don't fail unless they get damaged or lost, whereas HDDs are always a potential risk unless they're backed up. Beyond about 200 discs though, using optical media gets very tedious, and really should be ditched in favour of proper mechanical storage.

 

Almost universally, the sound in 1080p rips is 5.1 3-channel 1536kbps AC3. (512kbps per channel). Sounds good enough to me - ever considered a 512kbps MP3 inadequate?

 

Indeed, i'm currently streaming a large quantity (2TB or so) of media over to a friend via the internet, through an entirely automated process, running overnight, every night. try doing that with the requisite number of optical discs. It's just not practical
Back when I was living with other students, the data was live network shared so multiple people could stream off different things at once. One person would be watching TV, another a film, another installing a game off the shared games drive. It all works simultaneously, with no hassle of changing discs. For single-user, low-storage, optical discs are simple, but they're the cheap, basic, low-end form of storage. Mechanical HDDs right now are the correct choice for large quantities of data (multiple TB).

 

I've had a fair few shows bigger than 60GB - Mythbusters, for one is 300GB or so now.

 

It might push them up a bit, but what you'll most likely see is the current system of having PCs ship with 500/1000/2000GB drives, drop down to 80/120/160/250/320/500GB drives, in the 'off the shelf' market. Those drives have not suffered so badly as they're so unpopular.
It will definitely get worse before it gets better though. I would not be surprised to see prices for 1TB drives exceed $500 before the crisis is over.

 

Then you are doing something wrong as I too have tons of DVD's and BD's and it is not a pain, but then I keep organized. Hands done it is the safest way to go but like I said I use HDD's too but just not too safe to rely on ONLY even if you put a HDD away as backup one problem inserting it into your system and woo-la everything is gone.

Stevo

 

Backups are universal - I use them with mechanical drives - if I had this much data on ODDs, I'd make duplicate copies of them too. It's not like defective discs don't exist.

 

even the 5/6gb 1080p rips?

tbh I onky have 320kbs mp3, not heard a 512kbs one, but 256 to me is the bare minimum I want to listen to

 

Well, 'creep up' - the current increase is between 50% and 180%.

 

8GB 1080p rips certainly - less than that you'd have to check the details (open the file and look, or check the index site page details for wherever you're getting the file). In some cases they might use 768k (3x256) instead, not sure how often I've seen that. I've never encountered a 720p+ file with poor quality audio though, other than glitches.

 

It's not an argument it is a fact and you are a part of this discussion too so don't forget your part. I pointed out that Estuansis point has fault and it does, I stated that you and Sam would disagree and then you started the argument. You both take personal preference as your argument against fact. I personally don't care what you prefer to do as that is your choice but when you argue against fact it becomes miss leading, this is my point.

So you would be starting the argument when it comes right down to it. I like Sam's counter that you can find bad media well that works both ways but more so for mechanical devices.

It's up to you if you want to rehash this all over again.

Stevo