"cavelamb himself" wrote in message
...
Alex wrote:

"cavelamb himself" wrote in message
...
Drew Dalgleish wrote:
I have a whole bunch of DVD movies I'd like to have aboard the boat.
But for the space needed to store them (3 bookshelves right now).
What would be involved in archiving some of these on a USB type
hard drive.
How do you get tehm on the drive? Special software to read the
disks? Or "play" them on?
could you just throw away the cases and stack them on a spindle?
CDs are ok stored that way, but DVDs tend to be too fragile.
Why not put the DVDs in Tyvek or soft plastic sleeves? Google "DVD
storage sleeves" and you'll find many suppliers, at about a nickel per.
If you want the protection of hard plastic, there are "jewel box" type
cases that are very thin, especially those that store two per case.
It's a space issue.
I have a little over 1000 movies stored exactly that way (Thin cases).
It was a mad house when it was all VHS tapes!
DVD is a lot better - storage space wise - but still takes up considerable
physical space.
DVD's are made differently (than CDs) and really need to be better
protected than just sleeves or stacked on a spindle.
Besides, I don't want to take the disks themselves out on the boat.
I checked at Fry's today.
750 Gig USB drive for just under $300.
That would hold about 100 movies.
(guessing an average of 7 Gig or so per title?)
But how to load them is the question...

If you are willing to sacrifice a little playback quality, why not rip your
DVDs to MPEGs or other file formats which produce much smaller files?
E.g. http://www.wikihow.com/Rip-a-DVD-to-...ile-Using-DVDx
A two-hour movie will be about 750 megs. So your external drive could hold
about 1,000 films. Stack up a few of those and you'd have quite a library!
(g)