I'm using vobcopy with --mirror, no transcoding. Then I can still have bonus features and menus and all that. VideoLAN is cool in that it can play a VIDEO_TS directory directly, as if it were a raw DVD.
I'm starting to run out of space on my 250GB RAID-1. I have room for another two disks in my current machine, so probably 800GB. Plus I need another SATA card, since this motherboard only has two ports.
If I want to do this right, it's $3573.00 for another machine with eight 400GB disks, 3.2TB. But I think ripping just our most-watched movies will be cool enough for now.
My current machine has room for 5 disks. Currently it's:
IDE (boot)
250GB SATA (raid 1)
250GB SATA (raid 1)
[empty]
[empty]
Assuming I don't want to mess with my current RAID-1 (my $HOME, etc), I have two choices:
1) 2x 400GB SATA RAID-1.
2) replace the IDE disk with another 400GB SATA disk and do a RAID-5 over three disks. Then I'd have 800GB new, not 400GB. Just gotta look into current state of grub/lilo and software RAIDs.
Total logical capacity needed, I'm guessing:
250 discs * average 5.5 GB = 1.3T
But if only 66% are worth ripping = 916 GB ...
So with 800 GB new, that's just 116 GB on my RAID-1 I'd need to use, which is fine. I'm not using the whole 250 GB anyway. (kept large chunks unpartitioned for testing stuff)
If I wanted to watch my movies remotely (say, from a hotel room with net access...), how much CPU/bandwidth would I need to do real-time transcoding?