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General discussion

Ripping a DVD Library to External HD (for AppleTV)

Dec 9, 2010 4:14AM PST

My dad has a large library of DVD's, and the dvd players in my house are really beginning to suck. So I thought for this XMAS I would buy him an Apple TV.

What I'd like to do is buy a large HD (like a TB or something), and then rip his dvd movies to the drive so it can be connected to a computer and accessed by AppleTV whenever he wants to watch something. Does anyone know what I could do to get this done quickly, because I don't have the time to sit on my MBP and rip 300+ movies to my hard drive and then drag them to an external HD... I was hoping there was some hardware that could convert DVDs to digital format within minutes I could use.

Thanks,

Alegoo92

Discussion is locked

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"convert DVDs to digital format within minutes "
Dec 9, 2010 5:01AM PST

I've never seen such a thing. Even at shows and in the back rooms of labs.

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Fast rip?
Dec 10, 2010 12:44AM PST

Yeah Bob I am with you on this one for sure, fast? Uh even if it is possible transfer rates are such methinks he would be there for a while. Maybe an Esata hook up or USB3 but that would require considerable hardware modifications, sounds unlikely.

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Just did some esata vs. usb work.
Dec 10, 2010 1:45AM PST

And I was surprised it didn't reduce the time as much as I expected. My thought on this is that at USB 2.0 we are getting close to the "media speed" of your common HDD. I'll leave this to others and you to research HDD media speed.

What you want may be possible and definitely can be done on non-DRM DVDs but we can't discuss DRM removal (see the forum policies.)

What some don't get is that when you get a commercially made Video DVD (for this example) the license or rights may limit it to play from said media. I would not want to take on any court case about rips to HDD since too often I find folk will dispose or gift away the DVD and forget to dispose of the digital copy.

So with that we can state that if we are a little more patient then what you ask is possible. But I've yet to see a DVD 4.7GB media read in single digit minutes.
Bob