by bfauska on Thu Jul 21, 2005 11:06 pm
To copy the DVDs to your hard drive you will need to use either DVDdecrypter or DVDshrink.
DVDdecrypter is not supported by it's developer anymore but you can find it if you do a search with most of the major search engines. It has been reported to rip more DVDs successfully than DVDshrink.
DVDshrink allows you to easily trim off parts of the DVD that you don't want to store on your hdd, like menus, special features, subtitles, and extra audio tracks. It also allows you to compress the video so that you can store it in less space, if you choose to do this you will probably notice a loss in video quality, if you set the compression to "none" then you will have a lossless copy of the DVD. DVDshrink has been reported to have problems with the encryption on some disks (very few) and for those you would want to use DVDdecrypter.
Once you have the DVDs stored on your hdd, or if you just want to play them from the DVD drive, you will want to catalog them, the most popular program for that is DVDprofilier. Using this you can get all the info about your movies (Plot summary, actors, director, rating, genra...) from popular online sources like imdb, automatically. Then with a little help from previous posts in this forum you can transfer that info into xlobby.
Good luck, there seems to be a fairly steep learning curve with xlobby (I just told you almost everything I have learned so far) but the possibilites seem endless.
I hope this helped,
Brian
EDIT: Guess I type too slow, that's ok because I also left out any links. OOPS.
