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.

That would be SO much faster. I'll also need to make sure Sonic can burn them to playable DVDs (or else beg IT to let the Macs access the shared drives).

Don't bother checking for me - I can do a test run here (and our systems are so ridonkulously locked down that I'd have to double-check anyway just to make sure we aren't running some bizarro-world proprietary version of VLC with that feature disabled).

Jessica,

I believe VLC can play a disc image on PCs and Macs. I've done it before, but I'm not sure if they changed anything on the new version.