At first I suggested directly connecting the laptop to the TV or streaming to an Xbox 360. Both of these options weren’t appealing because the laptop would not always be in the home when other family members may want to access the video library.

We came up with a 3 part solution. Software to copy the DVD’s, external USB hard drive to store the movies, and the Western Digital HD TV Media Player.

Software

Many new movies come with a digital copy. However, a lot of them don’t, and certainly the old movies cluttering up the living room didn’t. If you put a DVD into your computer you will see a collection of files with a .VOB extension. These are the video files. They can be played directly from your computer using VLC or other video software with VOB support. The problem is the files are usually encrypted. Meaning if you copy them to your hard drive, then try and play it back you will get pixilated images if anything at all.

There is a free program called DVD Decrypter. It should work with most of your old movies and a lot of newer ones too. However it hasn’t been updated in a long time and it can’t copy many of the newer movies.

The software I suggest is Ideal DVD Copy. It cost about $40 but you can copy several movies for free with their trial version to make sure it works for you.

Both the above mentioned programs will make a full copy of the movie without any loss of video quality. Plus the few I tested came through with full 5.1 digital surround sound.

If you want to further compress the movie or change the video format to work with different video players such as your ipod or iphone, I suggest the free program Hand Brake. This will take your unencrypted .VOB files and convert them into a single MP4 or MKV video file.

Hard Drive

A typical DVD without further compression will take about 5GB of hard drive space. So a 500 GB Hard drive will hold 100 movies at full DVD quality. Plug the hard drive into your computer when you want to copy a movie. Then plug it back into the media player. Only real advice here is to buy the biggest you can afford. Here is a Hitachi 2 TB drive for only $159. 2TB will hold about 400 movies. Have more movies than that? Buy more hard drives.

WD TV HD Media Player

This Western Digital HD TV is a stand alone media player. It does not need to be connected to a computer and it connects directly to your TV. There are other movies players out there, but this is the only one I have worked with (other than streaming to an Xbox 360.) The WD works great. It plays all file types including the raw .VOB files. It comes with a remote control and supports 1080p and digital audio out. You can find it at tiger direct for only $99.

So to sum it all up if you have an external hard drive lying around you can get started with the free software and the WD Media Player for only $99. Add in the commercial software and a 2 TB HDD and you have a complete home movie server for under $300.

Update – RSS is not automatically pulling into facebook. It only worked when I set it up with my existing post. I’ve been reading that many people have similar issues. Now I am trying the WordPress plugin Wordbooker.

What does it mean? It means I can easily edit the content of my site online. No special tools or upload knowledge required. It also means I can easily add blog entries such as the one you are reading now. Everything runs on the server so all I need to access and edit the site is the same web browser I use to view the site.

WordPress is one of the free options we offer with all of our webhosting accounts. Contact me if you want to learn more or if you would like to demo WordPress for yourself.