First off let me say that "I NEVER Rip movies that I have not purchased!". Yes, I really do have a closet full of DVDs and Blu-Rays in jewel cases. Piracy is STEALING!
I don't rip EVERY movie I own, only movies that I like to watch a lot. I rip the movies that I do because I like to be able to play them at a moments notice, without having to search through hundreds of disks on shelves and in boxes. And it's pretty cool to have friends over, talk about some movie and be able to pull it up and play it within a minute.
Also, this is not the ONLY way to rip and play Blu-Ray, it's just MY way. If you know another way and it works for you, that's great!
A little about my system:
This is probably the first in a series of posts about my system. I'm planning on doing posts on building each piece seperately. Since this article is on ripping Blu-Rays, I won't be talking about Tuners or recording TV.
My Media Center is next to my HDTV, it's connected to the TV with an HDMI Cable, audio is connected to my Onkyo TX-SR703 with a TOSLink cable. Inside the Media Center:
Windows Home Server
Laptop - Asus G Series ASUS G Series G51Vx-X3A Intel Core 2 Duo 15.6" NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M NoteBook
My Network is wired and wireless. I have a GB switch in the backroom, Cat6 running around the house. I also have a Wireless N Access Point for Laptops and guests. I rip DVDs wirelessly, it works fine. There's no BD drive in the laptop so I don't know if ripping BD disks will work well over the wireless network.
What you'll need:
Install the various software on your computers, server and/or laptop as needed. I'm not going into the installation of each software. I'll do seperate posts for those.
Windows Home Server setup:
- MyMovies for Windows Home Server
- Created a share called "Movies"
Media Center Setup:
- MyMovies for Media Center installed as "Client Only"
- AnyDVD-HD
- VirtualClone-Drive
- PowerDVD 9 Ultra
Laptop Setup:
- MyMovies "Collection Management" Only
- AnyDVD-HD
Ripping and Managing the Movies
Ok, so once you have the Software installed as shown above. You can place the BD disk you want to rip into you BD-Drive. (Sometimes PowerDVD will start and try to play the disk, even if you have gone into options and disabled autoplay. I don't know why. It just does. Just close out of it.)
If you have AnyDVD installed correctly, you should see a balloon help saying "AnyDVD is scanning the inserted disk) Once it completes, you can Right Click on the Foxhead icon on the taskbar and select "Rip to image. . ."
Select the Blu-Ray drive you want to rip from and the destination of folder to place the ISO file.
Once you have selected the drive and folders click "Copy DVD". Depending on the speed of the drive, it could take an hour or more for the image ISO to be created.
Once the image is created, you can click the "Close" button in AnyDVD. You're done with it.
Open MyMovies Collection Management and click on "Title"/"Add Titles"
Choose the search method, you can search by Barcode, Disc ID, Title or Type in all the information yourself. I usually search by Title.
Select the correct Movie from the search results. (Here you see that there are 2 results that look the same, I think that's because 2 different people added the same movie to the MyMovies service with slightly different data. Barcode, format, edition or something else. You might have to preview the results to decide which one.) Click the "Add Online" button to add the movie to your collection. Choose the folder that you saved the ISO file to.
After the movie has been added to your collection, you need to change the disc location from "Online Folder" to "Online File" and choose the location of the ISO.
Once you've changed the File location click OK, and "Save Title" at te bottom of the main "Collection" screen.
There are some other settings that you can change that affect the way Media Center will display your added titles. I'll go into all those settings in an upcoming post on MyMovies.
Once you've made any changes you want to make. You can start up Media Center and navigate to the MyMovies menu strip. It can sometimes take a while to load up the MyMovies database. The more titles you have the longer it will take.
Once you've found the title that you want to play. You can either hit the "Play" button on your remote, or you can click on the title to see the Metadata.
When you hit Play, MyMovies will automatically mount the ISO file using VirtualClone-Drive. (As long as it's detected. If you haven't installed it, you'll get an error message.) After the ISO is mounted, PowerDVD will automatically start playing the movie.
When the movie is over (or you hit Stop) you'll be be back at the PowerDVD PlayMovie screen. Hit the Eject button on the left side of the screen. (If you don't eject the ISO, and you keep playing movies, MyMovies will keep mounting the ISO's using new drive letters. E:, F:, G:, H: . . .)
That's all there is to it!
I hope this post helped!
Seeya in the next post.
clubhouse, media center-windows 7, settings