6. The Problem With DVDs

Based on the success of ripping my CD collection to disk for playing through my AirportExpress, my original plan was to do the same with my DVDs and play them back with the LinkTheater. I thought I could just rip the contents of each DVD to a large network server and then browse through them for playback. But like many things, it turned out not to be that easy because the LinkTheater wasn't designed to operate this way.

In addition to the resolution limitation that I mentioned earlier, there are also restrictions that manufacturers must follow to prevent their products from playing DVD images across a network. Sigh. Although the supplied server from Buffalo was crippled in this manner, wizd was not affected by the same restrictions. However, even though wizd had some support for DVD image playback, its capability was fairly limited.

For example, I copied several Soprano's DVDs to my NAS library, with each disc containing several episodes. But when I went to play the DVDs, I found that wizd didn't support the main DVD menu. This meant that I couldn't tell which episode was which, so I'd often end up playing them out of order.

As I toyed with how to best build my video library, I also began to realize that the disk space required to hold a large DVD library was excessive. A typical DVD might hold 5-6 gigabytes, which would start to add up to some serious storage requirements. My library is currently over 100 DVDs, so it would take a real commitment to copy them to central storage and keep them backed up!

The other alternative for putting my DVD collection into a library was more complex than just copying DVDs to a big server. I played a bit with re-encoding my DVDs to DivX format, which drastically reduced their size. Using this technique, it was fairly easy to store a full-length movie in under one gigabyte!

But these conversions were very time consuming, and several times I'd let a job run overnight only to find that the end result was flawed in some respect. For example, more than once, my converted movie ended up with a non-english audio track. Other times I'd try a converted movie out, only to find that the audio track drifted out of sync after 10-20 minutes. The only way I could determine if this synchronization error had occurred was to actually watch the movie, adding even more time to the process.

When a conversion did complete successfully, the LinkTheater would handle it fine and it was nice to have a library of movies available. But ultimately, with the hardware I have now, I decided converting all of my library wasn't worth the time, effort, aggravation and storage.

So what I'm left with is a video library of the few movies I converted, nearly 100 individual television documentaries I'd collected and a few movies I created myself from my 8 mm videotape collection. I can play all of these across the network, but until I find a better conversion solution, my DVD library will remain on the shelf.