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Up to 100GB

2 (4.9%)

100GB-250GB

5 (12.2%)

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16 (39%)

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13 (31.7%)

More than 2TB

5 (12.2%)

Total Members Voted: 41

[benn600]

I request fast responses as I will be starting the video conversion process in the next few hours.

I store all my data at the moment on one 500GB drive + 2 more mirrors as onsite and offsite backup.

My issue is that I want to re-rip all my DVDs to higher quality/resolution/etc.  Since I am dedicating 200GB to FLAC music, I figure I should at least get somewhat close to DVD quality on video.  Therefore, I need some advice on what I should do as far as upgrading.

Before talking about drives, I am using Fair Use with Xvid and Quantizer = 2 which I have been told is the best setting without going to Q=1 which takes a ton more space with very little additional quality.  I want to keep the resolution as close to the original as possible, which seems to be automatic with these settings.

Now, the drives.  I really must keep an offsite backup without failure because I absolutely cannot lose my FLAC music (3 weeks of work, including scanning all cover art).  Even more important, I cannot lose my 15K or so digital pictures and various documents/commercial software I've purchased w/serials.

I could reduce to 1 offsite backup and then with one more drive, I'd have 1+1 and 1+1 for video.  This is a problem because I do'nt like having only one backup.

Second--I could buy 2 more drives...leave my current setup as is and just have 1 backup for video.  This would be OK because the video drive will be updated much less often and the backup drive would not be moved more than every few weeks instead of every week.

For the past 5 years or so I lived dangerously without much for backups and lost some data but was amazingly lucky.  I don't want to take those risks anymore.  I've learned.  HOWEVER--my current three drives cost me close to $800 for 465GB--almost $2 per GB.  The drives seem to be even cheaper on occassion so I will wait for a good deal this time around...but wonder if it's even worth it yet.  For one thing, the video really doesn't need backed up except that if I lose it, I have a ton of work ahead of me.

This is a complicated and difficult issue which I may be overworrying about but I don't want to chance losing my data.

[hit_ny]

Therefore, I need some advice on what I should do as far as upgrading.

reading and wondering *what* advice exactly ?

[benn600]

Lol

You solved my issue.  I am kind of just complaining about the issue and am curious what other people do, generally for backup.  If I didn't have to keep backups, I'd have 1.5TB from my three drives but I seem to think I need two backups so that puts me at .5TB!

[hit_ny]

One imagines you woud be slightly short of 5TB with backups.

At this point, many would reconsider whether putting video to disk in as lossless a fashion was worth it. Music is affordable with backups today, but video may become more affordable in the future.

I'd duplicate the DVDs and use those for normal use and keep the originals in a safe place. Exact copy, you wont have to worry if it got damaged, just dig out the original from storage and make another.

[bob]

Agreed. That's what I do with mine. The original stored under proper conditions ought to last a long time, probably similar to the lifetime of a hard drive.

[zxsix]

I agree.  My music is backed up regularly but I don't back up movies.
I have the originals that I can re-rip should I lose a hard drive full of movies.  Re-doing 20 movies won't cause me that much pain.
I also keep my movie drives shut off except when watching movies.

[drosoph]

RAID5 array ... that's my form of backup for video/music/pics ... with home videos and pics of the kids going to external backups monthly ....

[dlone]

as an aside q2 is really high - normally I use (with divx because xvid doesn't work with my upnp player) q5 - i'm pretty sure this close to q6 with xvid

try a few lower settings and see if you can really tell the difference  ?
It'd save a load of space if you can get the best setting with the higherst Q number

with divx, I usually encode at the 'extreme' setting, Q5 and it looks fine to me + saves a lot of disk space (on the tv you can use a higher Q value and it's still ok)
try a few values on a small clip and see how you go - better to set the encoding to take more time for the smaller file sizes

[benn600]

I tried different settings but there seemed to be a huge difference between each Q setting.  1 gave me about 40MB/minute...2 gave me 15MB/minute...3 gave me 5MB/minute.  That is a huge jump and I could definitely see a huge difference between 2 and 3.  I am using Xvid, though, and am a little confused.

One episode of South Park takes about 500-700MB at my current Q setting of 2 but looks amazing--close to the original DVD which is around 1GB for an episode.

I don't want to not backup video because I will be spending about 10 days using 8 computers with Fair Use.  I have 7 seasons of South Park, 8 of Simpsons, a few random seasons of other shows, and about 100 DVDs.  Each DVD takes a computer around 4-6 hours I would think.

I'm considering getting a WD My Book 500GB at Best Buy for $230 (Buy.com is $240) soon and then waiting for a little better deal on the second backup drive...of course the price may go back up this upcoming ad week.  I think I remember seeing them for $200 a few weeks back---geez!  My 3 now cost me $255 each!

[benn600]

I'd like to ask the same poll to most iTunes users.  I bet most of them would pick option 1.  People interested in MC are much more likely to have HUGE collections.  Especially with FLAC, filesizes can get out of hand.  I am starting to re-rip all my DVDs to much better quality than the first time I did it and had to devote a 500GB drive to just the video, so I'll soon be in the 3rd category (I'm in 2nd now).

[dlone]

One episode of South Park takes about 500-700MB at my current Q setting of 2 but looks amazing--close to the original DVD which is around 1GB for an episode.

Ahhh, cartoons...........

These are kind of a special case
With the right software, you can shrink these down to tiny sizes
It's a lot of information to give and at the moment I'm kind of stuck for time, so I can't give you all the answers right here

I'd suggest getting avisynth and going to the forums on http://www.doom9.org
Search for cartoons and see what you come up on - or post and see how they can help you
The entire board is dedicated to encoding of one type or another

What you want to look for is how to smooth out large flat areas and sharpen the edges of things
Using a 'sharper' version of the origional and a lower q ratio should give a smaller file size and equal result

using avisynth you can create a file called (for example)
myvideo.avs
this would be a text file that you edit in notepad etc
the contents would look something like this

avisource("c:\myvideo.avi")
sharpen(0.4)

that would simply sharpen the edges of the video so you could use a lower q ratio
sharpen(0.6) would sharpen it more etc
there's a load of things you can do as standard, and lots of plugins as well

on the storage side, it's kind of hard to give any help
if you just need 500mb - great get a network drive
on the other hand if you can see that you'll need more than you can fit in your pc (and this is hard to guess because they're all different)
the cheapest bet is to buy a cpu,ram,case with lots of slots, motherboard) and just fill it up with cheap hard drives
that's what I did - 2 pc's, one with 10 300gb drives and the other with 7 300gb drives - if i want i can add 3 more 300gb drives at £60 each
works great and if you don't need them all in one go it's even better - you only have to fork out £60 at a time when you need them

[benn600]

The biggest problem I see with the 10 * 300 GB method is that you then have just that, a bunch of small drives.  I hate separating everything.  I just learned with my latest addition of a 500GB drive that I can mount it as a folder on another drive so I still have my original "book1" shared network drive with the same folder called Video, but this particular folder is on the second drive.

Now, though, if I fill up my video drive, I'll probably have another 100GB free on my other drive but it's locked to music, pictures, etc.  I don't like spreading out things because I spent about a week going through every single file (generally) on the drive and deleting/organizing it.  I saved about 10GB and was able to archive some less important stuff (About 5GB) to DVD so I have a streamlined setup.

Doesn't seem like a lot but at least I know there isn't a lot of unnecessary junk on the drive.

Now answer this: do you use raid on all those drives?  That would be dangerous unless you use some redundant form of raid.  I also dislike running so many drives at once because of the power usage.

Can someone tell me what the average hard drive takes (in watts)?  That's crazy that you have 3TB in that one computer!  I still have a hard time understanding how people can build up that much stuff!  I haven't even filled up my 1TB--but it may not be long!  These huge video files fill it fast.

[dlone]

I don't use raid as on this pc as there's nothing I'd mind losing
I tend to replace drives pretty frequently - on average I'll replace them a year passes or when larger drives become cheap enough to justify it 


For organisation I've always done it like this
Create a folder called Shares
Share it on the network
Mount the drives as folders or sub folders inside shares
Then I just access the shared folder for all the data
That way, all my pc's see the data at the same location
Plus, when I upgrade my pc, I can usually just copy the registry entries for my software and not have to mess about reconfiguring all the programs

MC also makes it pretty easy to fill up hard drives - those ape files are pretty large
All my dvd's etc

The main reason they're all on my pc is so my dsm-320rd can play back all the movies/audio/pictures on the tv and I don't have to mess about with cd's and dvd's
By the way, the movies look way better on tv than on a monitor - the tv hides a lot of defects you might notice on a monitor - especially any interlacing artifacts 

[benn600]

I definitely agree but the whole point of ripping DVDs is to watch them on my computer.  I do have lots of ways to watch these videos on my older televisions but I am just as capable of grabbing the DVD.  Why can't it just take frames 1 & 2 and analyze for lines, then combine to form 1 frame since the interlaced signal is 60 fields/sec...so 60/2 = 30frames per second.  I'm getting all my DVDs copied to my 500GB drive until I can do some research and make a final call, then queue up the entire 52 discs of Simpsons 1-8 & South Park 1-7 (8 is on the way!).

[dlone]

well, your getting to the point of having a lot of reading to do 

first, you have to check the first 30 frames to be sure
second how does a computer know that what you can see on the screen isn't right?

it's problem with video in general - when they made the standards the didn't think to include any info on what the origional was recorded at - plus, the data may change anywhere through the video stream if it's an mpg

if we look at a frame and it's obviously interlaced there's no information that the pc can get at to deduce this - as far as it's knows "that's how it's supposed to look"

the best method I've found to check is to drag the video to g-spot http://www.headbands.com/gspot/ and check it's frame rate
then drag the video to VirtualDubMod http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=65889
if g-spot says 29.97 and VDubMod says 23.976 then it needs to be ivtc'd
(I usually use dgindex from doom9 and set it to 'forced-film" for these - they're nearly always mpg's/vob's and usually I get excellent results)

but, some videos are designed to only work with interlaced output and they just will not 'play nice' on a progressive screen no matter how much you work at it (and for these it's better to encode the video as interlaced)

[benn600]

I decided to go with Native 100%.  Since some of my viewing of this content will be on a television, this shouldn't be too bad.  I just don't want to use IVTC because it makes it look a little better but gives weird side effects (which might be when the frame rate changes).  I decided messing as little with the video is the way to go.  I encode it at the same resolution as the dvd to keep the modifications to a minimum.  I've had all 8 computers (3 are super slow) encoding 8 Simpsons & 7 South Park for the past 30 hours.  It's a lot of video crunching to do.  I use Fair Use and I got all the discs ripped to my 500GB drive and shared it.  That helps me keep things organized.  Then, I queued it all up, giving more to the faster computers.  It's amazing how long this process takes.  Once I finish this, I'm re-doing all my movies once more.

Too bad I couldn't borrow a whole mass of computers from a business or school or something to just get this project finished!  Then I have about 50 CDs I just got from eBay that I have to rip.  Media overload!