- April 16, 2014
- Posted by: admin
- Category: Maintaining A Happy Life, Time Management
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This is part of an ongoing series on how I digitized my entire life a few years ago. Nowadays, I do not have any paper, nor CDs, nor binders, nor DVDs; none of that stuff. It's all digital, baby!
My initial post on this is right here, followed by how to digitize cassettes here and music and audiobook CDs here. Today, we're going to talk about how to digitize your movie collection of DVDs and blu-rays, so you can watch any movie you own, whenever you want, at the click of a mouse, rather than looking for a shiny round thing to shove into a computer. Not to mention the fact that after doing this, you'll no longer need overloaded bookshelves of DVDs/blu-rays. Your movies will simply be files on your computer(s). It's very, very nice.
As usual, I'm writing this article for someone of minimum technical skill. (If you're a video techie-geek, most of this will bore you.)
One disclaimer here. Please do not do anything illegal. This is not a guide on how to pirate things. My laymen's understanding of the law is that you are allowed to make one backup copy for your own personal use of any CD/DVD/blu-ray you have legally purchased and that you don't share with anyone. I'm not an attorney so I could be wrong on that. I'm simply giving you the technical steps of how to digitize things. For legal minutia you'll have to look elsewhere.
On the plus side, many movies these days come with digital downloads already, which eliminates this legal issue.
Okay, here we go...
Items You'll Need
1. A decent-sized USB hard drive. You can purchase these on Amazon or Newegg very cheaply. What hard drive capacity do you need? Use this handy dandy equation:
(number of DVDs X 4.3) + (number of blu-rays X 27) = total amount of GB of hard drive space you'll need
We're going to be digitizing these movies in their uncompressed format, so you will lose absolutely zero picture or sound quality. That's the good news...the bad news is that these files will be pretty big. But as I said, hard drive space is very cheap.
There are ways to digitize movies in a compressed format so the movie takes far less space, but the problems with that are:
- There is some loss in quality. Not a lot, but some.
- The process is ridiculously technical.
- The process is ridiculously time consuming.
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