This post covers how I store both my SD and HD film discs. First off, Blu-ray…
To put DVDs onto hard disk I use DVDFab Decrypter as it’s updated regularly and enables you to only take the main movie with selected audio tracks. When putting a DVD onto hard disk this will give you VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders contained in a folder called the title of the DVD which is in another folder called either Main Movie or Full DVD (depending on what you take off the DVD). Each DVD takes about 20 – 30 minutes.
Now my Main Movie folder sits on its own drive(s) (I use a couple of 500Gb Western Digital MyBooks with another couple of internal 500Gb drives). By just taking the Main Movie I’m averaging about 4.5Gb per film.
Note: You may not have to follow the mounting instructions that follow. Try jumping to the bottom and just adding your DVD backup folders in Media Center first.
Media Center still won’t recognise these folders if you add them to your Media Library; it will only read them off a mounted folder. To do this:
- create a folder on C: drive called whatever you want (I created folders in C:\ called DVD01, DVD02 etc…), they’ll always be empty so don’t be too fussy about them.
- Then right click on My Computer and select manage.
- Under Storage you’ll see Disk Management, select this and you’ll see your drives.
- Right click on your hard disk that holds your DVDs and select Change Drive Letter and Partitions.
- Then click Add and select ‘Mount In The Following Empty NTFS Folder’ and point it to your empty folder(s) you created somewhere on C: drive.
- Then finally in Media Center under your DVD Library, right click and add your DVD01 folders to the library.
So now you should see them appear in your menu albeit without artwork. There are two (easy) ways to do this. You can either find the DVD’s artwork and save as ‘folder.jpg’ within the DVD’s folder, or you can use dvdxml.com and download a small .xml file into each DVD folder, this will trigger Media Center to go online and download artwork and a film description from AMG.com. There are other ways to create your own .xml files but I just couldn’t be bothered with the effort!
