# Movie storage drive? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [August 27, 2007, 6:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-storage-drive/417130 "2007-08-27T18:15:03Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Hedda\_Rosa](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hedda_rosa/32/1204_2.png) [@Hedda\_Rosa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hedda_Rosa)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2007, 6:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-storage-drive/417130/1 "2007-08-27T18:15:03Z")
I’m sick of the piles of DVDs in my house. I’d like to have a drive on to which I can load all 300+ of them, and then use a remote control to scroll through the movies (with pictures of some sort so my 4 year old can choose her movies), select them and then have them play on my regular TV. Does this type of thing exist? Thanks ---
**Author:** ![Harmonious\_Discord](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/74df32/32.png) [@Harmonious\_Discord](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Harmonious_Discord)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2007, 6:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-storage-drive/417130/2 "2007-08-27T18:49:07Z")
No. You have to deal with Digital Rights Management, and the consumer loses on that. I won’t dwell on that. A DVD is going to be up to 9G in size. 9G times 300 is 2.7 Terabytes of hard disk space. You’d have to run a compression program and settle for lesser quality to get all that on a hard drive. ---
**Author:** ![beowulff](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/beowulff/32/542_2.png) [@beowulff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/beowulff)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2007, 6:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-storage-drive/417130/3 "2007-08-27T18:55:31Z")
Sure, you can do this. I’m not going to get into the legality of this, except to say “who’s going to care?” You can “rip” a DVD to an H.264 compressed stream. A typical DVD will compress to well under 4 Gig’s. You might be able to put all 300 on a 1 TB drive. Then you can use Front Row and Apple TV to display on your TV. (I would do this on a dedicated Mac Mini.) ---
**Author:** ![Balthisar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/balthisar/32/2825_2.png) [@Balthisar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Balthisar)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2007, 8:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-storage-drive/417130/4 "2007-08-27T20:15:27Z")
I think I’ve got over 200 movies ripped to my MythTV backend. Of course, each and every movie I have is not copy protected, meaning that there’s no DMCA violations here. No, siree. They’re all ripped to MP4 which is acceptable, even on the big screen. I intentionally cut out all the crap like previews, menus, commentaries, etc. I also have them on a RAID’d drive, just in case. For the front end (the TV-half), I used hacked Xboxes. No HD off those, but I’ve been considering running MythTV on an Apple TV when I have the cash to throw away and risk. ---
**Author:** ![kinoons](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/a698b9/32.png) [@kinoons](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kinoons)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2007, 9:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-storage-drive/417130/5 "2007-08-27T21:29:59Z")
I have a dedicated media center PC in my living room. With a large hard drive and some sort of dedicated PC this can be done easily. FWIW mine are converted to WMA format and compressed down to about 2-3gb each, and they look great. ---
**Author:** ![Max\_Torque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e9bcb4/32.png) [@Max\_Torque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_Torque)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2007, 10:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-storage-drive/417130/6 "2007-08-27T22:04:09Z")
Why not invest in a DVD Mega-Jukebox? I found a Sony model on Amazon with a 400 disc capacity for about $300. Load all your discs and fuhgeddaboudit. ---
**Author:** ![KneadToKnow](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kneadtoknow/32/3999_2.png) [@KneadToKnow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KneadToKnow)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2007, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-storage-drive/417130/7 "2007-08-27T22:31:39Z")
I can give one answer, **Max** : double-sided disks. TV shows on DVD are especially prone to this abomination. ---
**Author:** ![Max\_Torque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e9bcb4/32.png) [@Max\_Torque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_Torque)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2007, 2:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-storage-drive/417130/8 "2007-08-28T14:22:34Z")
They are? I haven’t seen a double-sided disc in ages. I do have some older discs that are double sided, but I’ve heard that it’s more expensive these days to make double-sided discs than to just make two discs, so most companies are just putting everything on two or more single-sided discs. ---
**Author:** ![don\_t\_ask](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e68b1a/32.png) [@don\_t\_ask](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/don_t_ask)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2007, 2:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-storage-drive/417130/9 "2007-08-28T14:33:10Z")
I have a multimedia player which is like a giant MP3 player with a 250G hard disk. I could have bought it with a 500G disk. It has all my music, TV and movies on it and I only have to plug it into the appropriate sound/video source to play stuff. Since the average movie is about 700M when converted to DivX I could carry over 350 around with me. It only cost $200 with the HD. ---
**Author:** ![don\_t\_ask](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e68b1a/32.png) [@don\_t\_ask](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/don_t_ask)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2007, 2:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movie-storage-drive/417130/10 "2007-08-28T14:37:55Z")
Oh and while you can scan through thumbnails of running video on a MultimediaPlayer it is pretty hard to manage after a dozen files or so. I use a an nice orderly folder system and skip the images.