In geeky news, my open source application is getting packaged for Debian, making it packaged for at least Ubuntu and Debian now. I feel a bit guilty that I haven't worked on it in a couple of years, but the new developers that signed up have been doing such a great job I don't know what I would do.

I want to pick the collective brain here for a moment.

My screener library here at work is currently about 4000 DVDs held in albums on my windowsill. They take up about 5' of space. Space which I will not have when our office moves downtown next summer.

Basically, I need to find a way to digitize the entire library so it can be held on a network-accessible server FOR FREE because I have no budget for this. The files need to be accessible over the corporate intranet for the sales team to screen (we all have VLC so almost any codec will do), AND I need to be able to lay them to DVD for our clients.

I'm open to pretty much any suggestion. The only requirement is it has to be dead cheap.

Unpaid intern!

For the technology parts, I got nothin'.

I transcode my DVDs to MP4/MP3 packaged in AVI on Linux using Mencoder and acidrip to set up the transcoding script, it's free but awfully techy. You have to jump though a hoop to get the DVD decoder installed as well.

Mencoder might work on Mac but I don't know how to get the DVD decoder in the Mac world, or a Mac frontend application to set up the script. Though, I suppose once you have a working script you can probably use it generically for any DVD. You could also use Xvid instead of MP4.

I use tovid to make and burn DVDs, but I've never done it with one of my AVI files.

Jessica,

do you have network space for all of this, because that's a lot of space.

If you have network space, all you really need is time to rip the DVDs. I'm not sure what kind of machine you are on, but there are free DVD ripping tools on PC and Mac. If you do them while you are working on other things, you can probably do 5-10 a day.

I think the technology part also comes down to "unpaid intern". I know Jess is familiar with the usual Mac ripping options and the amount of storage space it'll take, but the sheer repetitive drag of it, if you don't want to be spending the next freaking year ripping DVDs, is honestly one of the things that keeps a lot of archives and libraries and such from digitizing mass quantities.

How much space do you have on the server? Why not copy the DVDs over as disk images? Simple, fast, can be handled by VLC, and no transcoding issues down the road.

The drawback, of course, is that it will require a minimum of 19TB of disk space, and probably much more.

I transcode my DVDs to MP4/MP3 packaged in AVI on Linux using Mencoder and acidrip to set up the transcoding script, it's free but awfully techy. You have to jump though a hoop to get the DVD decoder installed as well.

Hm, MPEG Streamclip will do all this in one step (and is already installed on both Macs).

The simplest option (though clunky) would probably be to encode everything to H.264 and just have the sales team retrieve the files from the shared drive every time they want to view something. I wonder how long it would take us to digitize the whole library one at a time like that. (I'd love to hire an unpaid intern and set him/her up with the Powerbook and an external drive for a few weeks, but just filling out the paperwork would probably take longer than doing the whole thing myself...)

Tom, can VLC on a PC play a disc image as if it were a DVD? (I do my production work on a Mac, but our corporate workstations are all PCs, so that's what the sales team uses.)

I have no idea about server space, but it will be easier to get a budget approved for additional server space in the new office than it will be to get me a freaking bookshelf because that's just the kind of mind-numbing bureaucratic INSANITY I'm dealing with here.

Tom, can VLC on a PC play a disc image as if it were a DVD?

I'm about 90% sure that it can do this, but I'll have to try it when I get home to be sure.