How To Digitally Organize/Start Your DVD Library

Although Blu-Ray media have taken off in recent years with their superb video and audio quality, many others still don't care enough about it to make the switch. If you were an avid DVD movie collector, you probably have hundreds of disc by now. Switching over to Blu-Ray means having to buy the same movies in your collection again and some of your movies probably isn't out on Blu-Ray disc yet.
If you use your computer as your media center hub, you can opt to digitally rip your DVD collection onto your hard drive so that you don't have to use the physical disc. Building your digital library takes time but it's really simple as I'll show it here.

First of all, I have to say that building your own digital DVD library isn't for everyone. Some may think it's a waste of time and hard drive space. However, some people actually prefer storing all of their media digitally for archiving and easier browsing. Basically in this tutorial, I will show you how you can rip the entire contents of your DVD movies onto your hard drive. The advantage of doing so will allow you watch your movie collection without having to physically find your movie disc and second, it can serve as a precious backup to your movie collection.

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I just want to note that you should only follow this tutorial if you actually own a physical copy of the movie you are ripping on the hard drive. It is illegal to do otherwise.

Requirements
- Windows XP Media Center Edition, Vista Home Premium or Ultimate, Windows 7 RC
- DVD HD Decrypter (Freeware)
- DVD Drive
- Lots of hard drive space!

The operating system requirement is due to the fact that we are going to use Microsoft Windows Media Center application as the front end to interact with our DVD library. If you have XP Professional/Home Edition or a lower version of Vista, you'll have to use another application. For example, you can use LifeHacker's simple DVD Play utility as the front end. It will then allow you to pick your DVD movies and play them back with the VLC player.
If you are quite committed on building your digital DVD library, you'll want to get a hard drive with tons of storage space. If you opt for a external hard drive, you'll have the luxury of bringing your entire DVD collection with you on to the go. Although you probably won't be able to use Media Center on a friend's computer, you can still easily watch your movies with other media players. Alright, let's begin.

# Preparing the Media Center
Windows Media Center will be the interface from which you will view and interact with all your movies in your collection after you have ripped them to your hard drive. Basically, Media Center is Microsofts entertainment software that allows you to watch/record TV, view pictures, listen to music, watch videos and much more all in one place.
By default, Microsoft disabled the 'DVD Library' setting in Media Center. It only allows you to play a movie if the physical DVD was in the drive. A simple registry tweak needs to be done in order to enable the DVD Library setting so that it recognizes your ripped files. If you are using the Windows 7 RC, you can skip this step as the setting has been enabled by default.

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Please make a backup of your current registry settings before editing.

1. Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\DvdSettings
2. In the details pane, right-click ShowGallery, and then click Modify.
3. Delete the contents that appear in the Value data box.
4. In the Value data box, type Gallery, and then click OK.

With this enabled in the registry, Windows Media Center should now show a new setting, as shown here:



# Creating your main DVD folder
Now, you'll want to create a DVD folder on the drive that will hold your entire movie collection. The directory structure is very important so you must follow the instructions here. Create a top level folder in which it will hold all your movies. All of your ripped movies in the future will be subdirectories inside this folder. I simply called mine just 'DVD'. Because you don't have any ripped movies yet, you can create a blank folder inside this folder with the name of the first movie you will be ripping. In my example, I will be ripping the movie 'Remember the Titans' so I'll create a folder with that name.
Now go back into Media Center and into your DVD Library. Of course, there shouldn't be anything in it or you might have two sample movie files as was in my case. I simply deleted them. Right click in an empty space and select the option 'Add Movies'. This will allow you to tell Media Center where your movie collection will be located so it can monitor it. Select the top level folder you created earlier. In my case, it will be C:/DVD. From now on, Media Center will monitor that folder for any movies you add to it.

# Installing DVDFab
I used DVDFab Platinum and still do but that is not free software. DVDFab HD Decrypter however, is free and is what we will be using here. With this free edition, you can't make physical DVD copy backups but it will only allow you to rip the DVD onto your hard disk. That should be enough though because that's what we intend on doing in the first place. So, install and reboot your computer.

You can download DVDFab HD Decrypter here.

# Ripping the DVD to your hard drive
Ripping a DVD with DVDFab is basically a one click process. Fire up the program, insert your DVD, wait for it to finish analyzing, and then hit Start to begin the process. It took only about 18-20 minutes for it to rip the entire DVD for my movie. Results may vary obviously. If you want to retain the entire DVD structure (for example, the menus, the extras scenes, etc) than you would want to make a full disc backup. It takes more space (around 7-8GB per DVD give or take) but you get to retain the entire DVD structure without losing anything and the quality will be the best. Also, if in the future you somehow lose the physical DVD or your actual DVD gets damaged, you can simply burn these files back to a DVD as it originally was. You can just make a rip of just the main movie if you want to save space but the menus will not be retained that way. By default, DVDFab will rip the files to your Documents folder in a folder called DVDFab.

Note:
In order for Media Center and this tutorial to work, you need to rip your DVD in the DVD structure (the Audio_TS and Video_TS). You can't place regular movie files like AVIs and MPG files into the folder and have Media Center recognize it as DVD files. You can put those files in your Videos folder inside your Documents folder and locate them in the Media Center under the Video section but they will not be recognized inside your DVD Library.

# Moving your files and grabbing cover arts
Now, we will move all the files ripped by DVDFab over to your folders created earlier. Locate the DVDFab folder in your Documents folder and open up the Video_TS folder. Cut everything in here and paste it into the movie subfolder. In my example, I will paste the files into the folder called 'Remember the Titans'. So, it will be C:/DVD/Remember the Titans. Check your Audio_TS folder but usually it should be empty.
Now for the cover art. Simply head over to Google, type in your DVD flick name, head over to the Image tab and just save the one you want. The next step is very important. You must place the image in the same folder as the movie files. So, it would go in the Remember the Titans folder for me. Also, the picture name MUST BE labeled 'folder.jpg'. Otherwise, it will not show up. Now if you head back over to Media Center's DVD Library, your first movie should be listed with the DVD cover art. Here is mine:



Here is how it would look like when you have a larger collection:



Now normally, this would be it. You can continue to repeat the process for each DVD you want to rip into your collection. However, if you're a movie buff or want some way to tag your movies with all sorts of information, you will need the MyMovies or Meida Browser plugin (or something similar), which is also free.

You can download MyMovies Media Center plugin here.

You can download Media Browser here.

Building your own digital DVD library has both its advantages and disadvantages. The good part is that hard drive storage space is cheaper than ever and you can get a 1-2TB drive for less than $200. You will be able to instantly browse your DVD collection by title, date, etc. If you use the MyMovies plugin, you'll have even a more powerful way of cataloging your library. Also, if you are a frequent traveler, you can rip movies you want to watch on your hard drive ahead of time so that you don't have to pack the actual DVDs with you for fear of it being lost or damaged. This tutorial doesn't require that you must rip 50+ DVDs. You can do it for a single movie if you so wish to. If you have a netbook, than you'll even see more benefit of doing this. Rather than lugging around a huge external DVD reader, you can now comfortably watch your movies right on your computer.
The downside of doing this is that it takes a lot of time. But ripping a movie is a one click process with DVDFab and although the process itself is not difficult, it does take a while. Also, storing your entire DVD library collection on a single hard drive can be labeled as a single point of failure. If all of a sudden the hard drive malfunctions, then all your work will be lost as well.

Evolution54