Digital: The Final Frontier

[STR]

I just embarked on my biggest media project ever: the total conversion of my DVD collection into digital files. It's a strange new world, where inconceivably large quantities, like multiple terabytes, become limiting in their lack of size. My 7 Season set of ST:TNG will take up 150-180 GB when it's done being encoded at high quality rate. My movie collection will be about a Terabyte all by themselves.

By Spring, all my DVD's will be in storage, the only physical media visible in my home will be blu-rays, at least until I have the storage space for them...

 

[Sparky]

What codec are you using to encode them? Are you worrying about such things as extras on the discs or just the movies/episodes themselves?

 

[Mr. B]

If you have that kind of storage space, why are you transcoding at all?

 

[trekkiedane]

If you have that kind of storage space, why are you transcoding at all?

Whut?

I have three TB (and change) of TV shows and films (running out of hard media soon ) and I haven't even begun transcoding my optical discs yet...

But, OK, I'm a collector, can't throw anything away

 

[Mr. B]

You said your TNG DVDs will take up 150+ GB of space? How does that compare to simply copying the .VOB files from the DVDs on to a hard drive.

If you were, for example, to encode them with DivX at 640x480 with a perfectly respectable bitrate, all seven seasons shouldn't exceed 50 GB.

 

[STR]

What codec are you using to encode them? Are you worrying about such things as extras on the discs or just the movies/episodes themselves?

H.264/x264. I'm going to do the extras, but since I'm still beginning this, they're not a priority.

If you have that kind of storage space, why are you transcoding at all?

I'm estimating TNG will take up 150GB. The straight DVD MPEG2 VOB rips are at least 400GB. H.264 is several generations ahead in capability than MPEG2. Given that trans-coding takes about the same time as decrypting and VOB copying, why not conserve space?

 

[Mr. B]

Oh ok, 150 GB is such a lofty number, I wouldn't have guessed a straight backup would be in the 400 GB range.

 

[STR]

That's exactly my point. When I got my TB hard drive, I got it almost as a joke. Once I started looking into this, I ran smack-dab into a technological wall I didn't even know existed.On the plus side, codecs have improved to the point where I can get DVD rips in manageable sizes.

The Future Enterprise from "All Good Things"

 

[Geckothan]

...and then when you've finished ripping and encoding it all, your house will get struck by lightning/an earthquake/some other natural disaster that creates surges or shock and your hard drives will crash!

Reliable physical media is the way to go (you can scratch/crack DVDs if you're stupid, but hard drives will fail eventually through normal operation even if you take care of them). Until they start making massive SSDs at non-ridiculous prices with acceptable write speeds and that don't die if you try to use them as swap/scratch space (despite being a solid state technology containing no precision mechanical components, flash isn't exactly reliable) or put a journalling fs on them (which any OS that's not from the dark ages will do by default), I'm going to keep my DVDs thanks!

 

[STR]

So my place gets blasted. I've got a good renters insurance policy. I'll use it to get twice the storage I have now and a faster PC to boot. Maybe I'll have enough storage to go lossless AND have redundant backup.

 

[Brolan]

Hard drive life is hard to determine. I've had hard drives crash, but I also have 2 WD hard drives in my Tivo that have been spinning since 2002.

 

[STR]

Well, I'm starting to ignore the lifespan of hard drives, because within 5 years (the expected life of a traditional mechanical disk drive) we'll have terabyte-class solid state drives at reasonable prices. we've already got 512MB SSD's for $2,000, and what PC technology doesn't nosedive in cost in 5 years.

SSD's are darn near ideal for media storage, since they only degrade with multiple rewrites and the whole purpose of media storage is to put everything on there once and be done with it. Flash memory cells are good for 10-20 years (nobody really knows since it hasn't been around as a mature tech that long) if you leave them alone, but you'll probably have to replace it with a bigger drive before that. A DVD movie is about 1-1.5GB today using H.264. HD content is about 10-15GB per movie when compressed the same way, one can calculate what a 4K movie (as in 4,000 pixels high, compared to 480 for DVD and 720/1080 for HD) would require when they're standardized. You're looking at 100GB/per minimum.

 

[Meredith]

I cannot wait till we get 100TB MRAM disks with a SATA4 interface.....

 

[STR]

I'm in the middle of the last season. The series itself looks like it will be 110GB. All the DVD extras are 10-15 GB. So...anyone planning on doing this yourself, you know have a benchmark. I could probably have gotten the whole thing under 100GB, but I erred on the side of quality.

For comparison, the TNG box set uses about 40 dual layer DVD9's, with an average of 7.9GB of material on each, which makes for 316GB total.

After this, I'm on to my 4 seasons of House.