Not Quite What I Expected

Yesterday I was browsing through some of the blogs I like to read when I came upon a post on the super site for windows about ripping DVDs to your computer. The author, Paul Thurrot, explained the procedure and I've pretty much been following his outline. He explained that he will often rip a DVD to his laptop, or put some movies on his iPod or zune when he travels, so that he doesn't have to keep a handful of discs with him. I also know that he is a big fan of Apple TV, so I assumed he had some sort of system worked out for storing all of these movies that he has copied. This has been a bit of an issue for me, so I wondered how he handles it.

Once a week Paul publishes a mailbag post where he answers emailed questions. I emailed him and wondered if my message would make the cut:

I just finished reading your article on ripping DVD's. I had heard you discuss this a year or two ago with Leo Laporte on Windows Weekly (his weekly podcast) and have been pretty much following this exact method. I wonder what you do with all this media once you rip it though?

I fell in love with the idea of Apple TV last November, and now I own 3 of them (the old hotplates, not the tiny little pucks). I have a pretty large DVD collection (450+), and initially I thought it would be great to have all of those DVDs available at the click of a button. I find though, that I don't really sit down to watch movies on my apple TV, but I do watch a lot of TV shows. I have most of my favorite TV shows on DVD, and I've started ripping them, but this is a slow process, especially if you want to add all the metadata like episode number, art work and episode descriptions. Is there any way to speed this stuff up? I pretty much go to wikipedia, IMDb, or the Network website, and manually copy all of this into itunes, via the get info right click menu.

Also, what about storage? JAG ran for 10 seasons and has 227 episodes. Buffy/Angel have 12 seasons and 254 episodes. All of this has eaten up most of my hard disk space, and I'm more than halfway through a second "media only" 2 TB hard drive. How do you store all of your DVD rips, or do you just toss it out when you've watched it?

Finally, I hate that my PC always has to be running itunes for this whole setup to work. I've got a couple of old pentium 4 machines in my closet collecting dust. Should I set one of these up as an itunes only machine, or do you think it would be better to look into some kind of WHS (Windows Home Server) solution?

Thanks in advance for any insight you might be able to provide!

I was certainly surprised 5 minutes later when I got a response back from him:

Right, the issues you've raised are pretty much the problem. Now what?

I usually don't save most of the files. They're too big. And I don't back them up at all for the same reason. But I will rip a few movies and/or TV shows before a trip. I usually just lose track of them or delete them.

Hmm... Glad he answered, but his answer was a bit of a non-answer. Pretty much "that's the problem alright!" and then "good luck figuring it out, I don't bother with it."

I've been thinking about storing all this stuff on my computer for quit a while. I have several ideas on how I could store and stream all of my media, I just haven't decided which way is the best, and most economical. I suppose I should just try something and see how it works

out.