Peter Hendra wrote in
:

My God!
How big are your hard drives. and how big is each movie? I use DVD
Shrink for copying DVDs from double layered to single but they still
are over 4 gig.



Divx-compressed movies come off Usenet in 2 flavors....700MB, so they fit
on one old CDR, or, now that DVD+R is so cheap, 700MB to 2GB for better
resolution and a bigger picture without the computer having to expand it.

A 4.5GB DVD+R stores from 4 to 6 full-length DivX movies that look just
like HDTV in widescreen, if they were ripped from original DVDs. This
makes storage quite easy.

As there are so many available, I'm up to about 3TB of hard drives,
IDE/SATA and external 500GB USB drives, all of which are dirt cheap, now.
I just paid $US179 for a new Western Digital 500GB MyBook USB2 drive.
That's easily 500 movies with a hundred GB left for a few thousand MP3s
plugged into the laptop. No need to carry fragile CDs or DVDs,
commercial or homebrew, out with you...no storage problem at all. The
500GB drive is the size of one small book.

Never saw DVD Shrink. DivX is a much better codec. Download some movie
sets from alt.binaries.movies.divx, combine them with WinRAR
(www.rarlabs.com) and watch them with VLC, the free VideoLAN player from
http://www.videolan.org/ The VLC player has its own codecs, so it will
play many things Windoze is incapable of playing and has many portings to
other OS like Linux, BeOS, Unix, Mac, etc. It's the finest video player
on the planet. Read about the community of genius students responsible
for it. The movie industry hasn't figured out how to trash them, after
they wouldn't cowtow to the threats.

Larry
--