While I do keep archival DVDs of my photos, I use flash drives, sd, etc. way more. My son works part time as a night security guard and pretty much watches movies all night, so we rip them to a flash drive and he can easily carry 10-15 movies with him in one tiny drive. My husband has a long commute and we rip his music to a SD card that his car stereo accepts. He loves not having a stack of cds to constantly switch out. I will sometimes use those same drives on the XBOX also. My stack of blank DVDs are gathering dust.
I just use an adapter that plugs into the cassette port in my car stereo (older car) and into the headphone jack of either my iTouch or phone for driving music. 
I also have some videos on my phone and Touch, could add more with the storage space I have, but I’m not nuts about watching much video on that small a screen.
This is not exactly true.
You can connect external hard drives through USB ports and then you can do both input and output using those ports.
Also jump drives (aka handy drives aka USB drives). Same thing.
I believe johnpost was trying to say that the USB ports on Blu-Ray players are output-only, in answer to control-z’s question.
An excellent idea, as far as I can make out. I have a different media player (WDTV Live,) but the result is largely the same. My burned DVD’s (and CD’s) have slowly been migrating to hard drives. I haven’t actually thrown them out, but the big ol’ wallets they’re stored in are now in boxes in deep storage.
The media on my hard drives are cataloged, .par’d (remember .par?) and duplicated for redundancy. Even DVD9 seems a bit whiffy, with hard drive storage being as affordable, space-efficient, and suitable-for-archiving as it is now. CD-R turns out not to be all that when it comes to archiving - I’ve lost a lot of OTR because the dyes in the data layer just went to shit after fifteen years or so.
Of course, actual DVD’s are more durable, but just for convenience most of my DVD collection has been ripped and resides on hard drives. - the DVD’s are in boxes in storage. When I think that only a few years ago I dedicated entire shelves to physical media that was just sitting there in case I wanted to refer to it, it seems ridiculous. That shit doesn’t need to take up so much space - it can all be easily accessible and still leave floor space for my kids to use. (Not to mention the merciful absence physical discs for them to pull of the shelves and do terrible things to.)
Goddamn, even all the Wii games I’ve bought over the last five years occupy a USB drive about the size of a deck of cards attached to the console - the boxes are waaaaay in the back of my storage space. I am looking forward to the day that a new Xbox console comes out and my need for Xbox Live on the 360 lessens to the point that I can do the same thing with all my Xbox games. Discs? Really? I have to get up and root through drawers full of *discs *to find my game? Excruciating.
I don’t buy DVD’s anymore, but when I buy TV shows on BluRay, the first fecking thing I do with them is rip them to a big-ass drive before I even try to watch it. I might actually watch movie on the disc beforehand, but I’m not going back to the disc for a rewatch - if I think I might want to watch it again, it’s getting ripped.
Once you get used to having everything right there, it’s hard to tolerate having discrete items residing on such an unwieldy medium - that’s just for getting it home. If infrastructure ever gets to the point where you can impulsively grab downloads of 25GB (or 200gb for a “box” set) discs are deader than dead. I’m looking forward to that. 
Well, sure, once you figure out he means DVD-Rs rather than just DVDs. I haven’t used burnable media in ages. But it’s stupid to throw out your DVDs unless you’re having storage problems or have another physical* copy. And, even then, you’d be better off selling them rather than literally throwing them out.
*If you’ve got a legitimately purchased [del]digital[/del]software copy, I guess you could just use that, but I’d only do it if the place you purchased it from allows you to download the movie again, or you’re allowed to have a backup.
The reason I am going to throw them out is because they contain extremely inferior programs that I have recorded myself from my TV. I have a Magnavox DVD Player/Recorder that allowed me to record TV programs. I used to subscribe to all the movie packages and premium TV packages from the cable company and would record TV programs and movies onto type R DVDs or type RW DVDs. I’d use either one under different circumstances.
But my point is that all those recordings contain bits of commercials because I had to stop the recording when a commercial came on and restart it when it finished and I was often busy and failed to pause it for a commercial and wound up with many commercials scattered all over the DVD. The result is that those DVDs are now extremely painful to watch when I can instead watch clean video files that were professionally recorded and contain no commercials. There is just no comparison.
If you think it’s “stupid” to throw them out, then you are most welcome to meet me and I will sell you all 2,000 of those crap DVDs for one dollar.
By the way, I have cancelled my entire cable TV service and I used to pay close to $200 per month for it. I now pay only $60 per month for a high speed Internet connection and it was the best decision I have made in a long, long time.
I just want to say that all I tried to do in this thread was to share an idea I had that has been working out really well for me.
I thought the other members of this forum would benefit from this idea. At the very least, if they didn’t like it, they didn’t have to use it. If they did like it, it might save them a lot of time and money and enhance their viewing pleasure.
I only wish that other members would share their ideas and information about new technology so that I could learn these things the easy way instead of having to figure most of these things out by myself.
I can’t understand why people would call new ideas presented by others “stupid”. They may benefit other people. There is no reason to discourage people from sharing new information and new ideas in this forum.
I think that kind of thing is a discouragement and it’s very disappointing.
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“DVD players have USB ports now!” isn’t a new idea. I bought a cheapo DVD player like five years ago and it had two.
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This is a discussion forum and, in a discussion, some people will think you’re just wrong. No one is attacking you, that’s just the nature of the beast.
- Every time you post a “new idea,” you eventually come back and yell at us for being mean to you because we didn’t shower you with blow jobs or something. Jesus, get off the cross already.*
- ETA: Ha! That was totally unintentional.
Who has the time to watch all these movies?
DVD player having USB ports is not the new idea.
The new idea is that they now support more than just tiny Handy Drives (aka Jump Drives aka USB drives) that usually have capacities of 8GB or 16GB or and especially that they will support external hard drives that have capacities up to 3TB. An external HD with 3TB storage is equivalent to about 375,000 Jump Drives with a capacity of 8 GB. So, yes, I was fairly wow’d when I discovered this.
I don’t know what the upper limit is on my player’s external HD’s capacity. The largest one I have is 3TB and that is enough to hold a huge number of feature length movies.
The average movie file I have is approx 700 MB. 3,000,000 divided by 700 is 4,285. So, I would guess that you can store about 4,000 movies on a 3TB drive. That is equivalent to about 12,000 30 minute TV shows if you figure that each movie is approx 90 minutes long.
I guess I was very happy and excited when I first discovered this and I wanted to share it with everyone here because I would be very happy if someone else discovered such a thing and they would share that info with others by posting it here.
As far as blow jobs go, I sir, take full responsibility for my own orgasms.
But thanks for thinking of me anyway.
For anyone who wants to know the precise numbers,
1 MB is approx 1,000,000 bytes (106)
1 GB is approx 1,000,000,000 bytes (109)
1 TB is approx 1,000,000,000,000 bytes (10**12)
So, 700MB is 700,000,000 and 3TB is 3,000,000,000,000
And 3TB divided by 700MB can be simplified as: 3,000,000 / 700
Finally, a brief note to the wannabe hall monitor,
If you don’t like me posting this kind of information, why don’t you post some good information of your own, if you have any.
that true, the port on the player allows data into the player, not out.
I don’t think there ever was a size limitation on plugging in USB devices besides thumb drives into players/TVs that had USB ports. Any device that presents itself as a disk drive and has a standard directory structure should work. I plugged a 3.5" external floppy drive into my Blu-Ray player, and it was detected just fine.
For me, USB connectivity is an interim step in my ultimate goal of consolidating my media. Right now, it’s a handy way to have a large number of videos at my fingertips, as well as to use things like 3D YouTube videos (which work great on 3D TVs).
For hard drives, I would err on the side of caution and not use USB-powered ones. All of the hard drives I use are externally powered, which means more crowding at the AC outlets. For my setup, I have to provide power for a TV, sound system, Blu-Ray player, record player, laserdisc player, AC3 demodulator, DVR, amplified TV antenna, and hard drives as they are filled, as well as keeping an outlet open for whenever I want to plug in a game console… combined with A/V cables to and fro, it’s an unholy mess behind my entertainment center. Since my ultimate desire is to eliminate clutter in the center, putting my DVDs on hard drive and then storing them is only the first step. Eventually, I’d like to pare things down to TV, sound system, antenna, and a wirelessly connected central media server/network. Oh, and an Atari 2600.
The big issue with players/TVs with USB input is codecs and containers. Not all devices will play all video formats or be able to handle all containers. My first USB-equipped player would pretty much only play DivX (not DIVX!), which limited its usefulness. My current player currently chokes on about a quarter of what I download, and I often have to reencode video clips I (legally) download from certain sites. It can open .mkv, .avi, etc., but may not like what it finds inside. It’s also not friendly to certain extensions. I have to manually rename .m4v to .mp4, for example. Usually the instruction manual will tell you what formats it supports, which is handy if you do your own encodes, and occasionally manufacturers will release updates to firmware that expand file compatibility. The ideal for me will be to eliminate all of this bother. It’s trivially easy to add codecs as needed to a computer, so ultimately I’ll be able to simply stream video and audio from my network without having to worry about whether the player can handle my latest file.
In the mean time, after sussing out video and container issues and such, the other big challenge for me is maintaining files in a logical directory structure and with logical filenames. My player takes ages to scroll through large directories, and doesn’t show thumbnails. For some of my ahem preferred subscription sites, I might have hundreds of short video clips. When on my computer, I didn’t care too much about sub-dividing them as I could simply perform a file search, quickly zip through to get something I wanted to watch, or look at thumbnails to figure out what I was looking for. A site that gives you a week worth of clips entitled “092212.wmv, 092312-1.wmv, 092312-2.wmv, …” is easy enough to handle on the ass on PC, but is a pain on the Blu-Ray player. And if I rip and encode my Dick Van Dyke series set to HD, instead of just storing all 158 episodes in a “Dick Van Dyke” folder with filenames like “01_01 The Sick Boy and the Sitter.mkv,” I have TV Shows>Dick Van Dyke>Season 1>“01 The Sick Boy and the Sitter.mkv”. Shorter navigation time.
What a bizarre post.
Carry on sir.
Yes, and I apologize. As Student Driver said, I misunderstood your meaning.
I am surprised you thought that was bizarre.
Your profile says that you are an enineer and I would have thought that if anyone understood numbers, it would certainly be an engineer.
In my preceding post I referenced some numbers without really explaining how I came to those conclusions.
I tried to edit that post to show the calculations that led to the conclusions, but I was past the time limit.
So, I had to make another post that showed the calculations. In high school, when we took exams, they told us to show all our “rough work” on the left hand page (if I recall correctly). Well, that post was just my rough work that showed how I reached my conclusions. I showed how the capacity of a 3TB External Hard Drive divided by the size of an average movie (which is 700 MB) led to the conclusion that one 3TB Hard Drive would hold approx 4,000 movies.
Word to the wise: Consider reevaluating the appropriate size of a movie file, or before long you may end up feeling the same way about your current collection as you did about your cable-ripped shows. 700MB for a full movie makes sense if you’re limiting yourself to a CD-R, but you’re going to have a pretty poor bitrate/resolution - it’s going to look lousy if you try to watch it on a hi-def set.
I think 1.5 to 2 gigs is the bare minimum for a movie if you don’t want to be distracted by poor quality. When I rip Blurays to add to my library, 1080p with a target of 8gb gives me confidence it’s going to look nice.
I’ve been vaguely toying with the idea of doing something like this for some time.
But something I’m unclear on… if I legally own a commercial DVD (or blu-ray), is there software that legally lets me download it all onto a hard disk, and then play it back:
(a) with absolutely no loss of video or audio from the original
and
(b) with all the menus, special features, subtitles, and whatnot, navigable and accessible as if I were playing the DVD itself in a DVD player?
Also, does anyone know the amount of actual storage on a DVD or Blu Ray?
For DVD, the type of disc roughly indicates its size; e.g. DVD5 = Around 5GB…DVD9 = Around 9GB and so forth for DVD10, DVD14 and DVD18.
Single layer Blu-Ray = 25GB
Double layer Blu-Ray = 50GB