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.

Yes, the disc image--> VLC method works! Score!

Now to convince IT that I need 15TB of storage space...

Based on my sample size of 1, encoding to Quicktime would be about a third of that, but would take 4 times as long. ICK.

Or I could just put my foot down and demand a budget for encoding so we can send the DVDs offsite and pay someone else to do it. Hope springs eternal.

I said at least 15TB. Depending on how many of the DVDs are double-layered, it could end up being as much as double that.

The hourlong prog I just tested came out at 3.2GB. 4000 DVDs of that length (and not all are that long - VERY few are longer) works out to about 12.5TB. I also haven't weeded any out yet - I can probably junk about 10% of these before we even start.

Or I could just put my foot down and demand a budget for encoding so we can send the DVDs offsite and pay someone else to do it. Hope springs eternal.

or you could just use the money to buy a bookshelf.