Stupid question from a newbie

[wleary5]

I was looking for a convenient way to store all my dvds without taking up much room, when I came across Xlobby. I am hoping that it is what I am looking for, but to be honest, I can't figure out what Xlobby does! I'm not stupid but I guess it's something that I'm not familiar with but can anyone tell me if this is a worthwhile way to store all my Dvds? And where does it store them? Online? What about space-does it use all your space on your computer?

Sorry for the basic question but I am truly interested!

Thank you

[rembetis]

No offence, but it sounds like you have a lot of reading to do.

Xlobby is what is known as a "frontend" -- basically a graphical interface through which one can access various media (movies, music, pictures) stored on a computer. Xlobby is uniquely flexible, though, so it can do a lot more.

As far as storing movies go, you have basically 3 options, all of which require a large hard drive. How large depends on which option you choose (the first option requires the most space, the third the least. As compression increases, video quality decreases). Storing them online is not an option as copying/ripping DVDs is still technically illegal and any company offering to store rips would quickly find themselves out of business. Anyway, on to your options:

1. Use DVD ripping software (DVD Decrypter or DVD Shrink are most common and probably best options) to rip the DVD in its entirety. Typically requires 4-9 GB (that's gigabytes or 1000 MB) per movie. So that's anywhere from 20-40 DVDs on a 200GB hard drive.

2. Use DVD Shrink to compress the movie, but still keep it in one of several DVD-playable formats.

3. Rip the movie and convert it to another (greater) compression format like avi or mpg.

Once you have your movies ripped to a hard drive, you would then use Xlobby (plus the DVD player software of your choice) to organize and play them on a computer or TV.

Hope that helps you get started...

[bmblank]

Ripping dvds and keeping them on a harddrive is a most desirable situation, but if you don't have the harddrive space could you not keep your dvds in some sort of collection with the coverart on xlobby and then when you want to play a movie it would say "Please insert the Dukes of Hazzard disc into the dvd player" or "Please insert dvd #152 in the dvd player"? And so then you put it in and it continues to play... Or instead of a hard drive the library could be a 100dvd changer and it automatically puts in the right dvd. This way the library woudln't have to ripped and hard drive space wouldn't be an issue. I guess I'm not totally sure on how this would be automated, but the controls could still be on xlobby with an irblaster controlling the dvd player.

I'm just trying to come up with different configurations so hopefully xlobby can cater to a wider variety of users...

Good comments though.

Ben

[P3rv3rt B3ar]

Usually people have changer vs. HDD stance and defend their camp furiously. However i think both are rather neat solutions. Nowadays both solutions are pretty much equal in cost- and space-efficiency. I guess biggest difference is in practicality, ripping takes loooot of time, yet filling changer and organizing it takes up few nights too, and usability, if your changer is not UOP cracked it will take some time to launch movies, especially true with ones with long copyright crap campaings, yet since u have HTPC running the show u will prolly display some trailers while changer is going truogh mandatory FBI, MPAA, and FACT crap. All an all both are great solutions. (personally im using changers, yet i have RAID system for storing other media and movies with double sided disc.)

To answer your question... u can have movies in shelf and have xlobby to ask disc, but thats extremely bad solution space-efficiency-wise and yes, u can have changer(s) and control them with XLobby. One word of advice though, think carefully do u want a changer which is controlled by cable or just by infrared. Infrared ones might be rather unreliable, but ones u can control with cable (RS 232, FireWire, propriety) are rarer and generally more expensive.