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[steveklein]

hey guys. i'm ripping all my dvd's and storing them on my hard dive and i want to be able to easily play them in a nifty, sleek fashion through media center 12.

my problem is ive never dealt with dvd ripping before so i'm a little confused. i've ripped a couple of movies and they create folders out there like

/Blood Diamond
/The Departed

and within each of these is an empty AUDIO_TS folder and a VIDEO_TS with various files, including multiple large .vob files

when i go to play a movie such as the departed, it recognizes all the vob files i guess combined or something but it plays 3 minutes worth of trailers that i'd like to skip before it gets to the dvd menu (which is where i would like the thing to start, because i am ripping extras too).

anyone got an easy way around this? any other cool skins/plugins associated with a "dvd jukebox" if you will that i should know about?

thanks in advance...

oh, and great software so far. i look forward to purchasing after my trial is up!

[scottlindner]

Did you ever figure this out?  I'm looking to do the same (same concept as BeyondMedia DVD Library plugin).

Cheers,
Scott

[benn600]

Speaking from experience with 3.72TB of ripped DVDs (that I own or are home movies) equaling 662 ripped movies, I have some extensive experience with the whole thing.  Right now I have two HTPCs setup.  One in the kitchen and the second in my room.  You really need a decent machine to run it well.  The slower machine has difficulty with some things.  We have small remotes that I have mapped all the buttons to in MC.

So we have 662 movies accessible at any moment.  Just the other day we were scrolling through our collection and I was just in awe when I realized that any movie was accessible at any moment.  It's quite impressive.

Addition: My procedure:
1. Rip DVD to Video folder.
2. Grab cover art from Amazon.
3. Crop and clean up cover art + rename to folder.jpg.
4. Put VIDEO_TS files in the top level folder.
5. Delete the VIDEO_TS folder (and AUDIO_TS if it exists).
6. Move folder.jpg file to the DVD folder.
7. Rename folder to the movie in my clean format: initial caps with (Disc 1) if necessary.
8. Move the folder to its correct category: (Comedy, Christmas, Television, Movies, Home, Documentary, Music)

Then I manually import the Video folder on the server because Auto-Import crashes MC last time I checked (only on my server, though).  Then I fill properties from filename: [Genre]/[Name].  Then I quick find cover art.

My browsing method is a search list that includes all categories except Television.  Television is broken down to each show.   So the first Video browse would be all the categories above (minus television) and then each television show.  It works great.