Robertl594 Loc: Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and Nantucket

I know this is off topic but I bet some of you know the solution. I have about 300 DVD movies in a Sony DVD changer. I would like to convert them somehow to put them on a hard drive so I can access them on my various smart TVs throughout my house and get rid of the player. I am thinking of some kind of network server. I would suspect that these exist but know little about them.
Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks
RL

markngolf Loc: Bridgewater, NJ

Most, if not all TV's have USB ports. Since a flash drive works, I'm pretty sure an external USB hard drive should also work. I always put my shows on flash drives and they run perfectly. There is essentially little difference between a flash drive and a USB external drive. Yes, I think a network drive should allow access by all your smart TV's.
This should help:https://www.pcmag.com/feature/362130/how-to-set-up-and-use-a-network-drive

Mark.

BlueMorel Loc: Southwest Michigan

I have a new bluetooth dvd player that has Roku installed in it. My various connected devices - computer, tv in the other room, etc, recognize the bluetooth connection. I haven't tried it yet, but I bet that's the cheap way to connect them all and watch my dvds on any other connected screen. Sadly, though, with all the streaming media content available, I don't seem to get around to playing my old dvds or even vcr tapes very often.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

So at 4.7GB/DVD, you’ll need around 1.5 TB of storage in your server which can be any computer you already own on your network. You can then stream using any of the streaming SW (such as MS media player) over the network to any DLNA renderer. Most newer “smart” TVs have this capability or you can use one of the popular streaming devices. The caveat here is disk reliability. Just loading up the 300 DVDs will require constant writes over a large portion of the drive, something that rarely happens in day-to-day use, and playback will require constant access and head seeks if you use a conventional HD. I would ideally opt for an SSD or if that’s too expensive, an enterprise class HD or mirror two drives so you can recover if one fails. It’s a lot of work to copy all those DVDs, and you don’t want to lose it. My oldest son, who does DJ shows at weddings, spent the summer ripping all his CD collection to an inexpensive external HD, only to have it fail, wasting hundreds of hours of time. Lesson learned.

Robertl594 Loc: Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and Nantucket

That’s kind of what I am thinking as well. I bought an external 4tb usb drive to copy all of my Lightroom files onto so I could have them with me when I travel for extended times. It took quite a while to copy those files and then it failed within 1 week!

therwol Loc: USA

I've never copied commercial DVDs. I have one thought. Aren't they copy protected? If so, shouldn't the issue be brought up? You couldn't even copy commercial VHS tapes in real time without going through a time base corrector that would strip the copy protection information. VCRs could detect it and refuse to make the copy. Video capture cards could detect it as well. (Maybe I'm just living decades in the past, so correct me if I'm bringing up something irrelevant.)

Phil249 Loc: Southern WV

Download WinX DVD Ripper Platinum for free. Each movie takes about 5 minutes and can be saved in many formats.

Robertl594 Loc: Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and Nantucket

Thank you

wmontgomery Loc: Louisiana

I hate to watch DVDs because of the non skip advertising. This is what I have. I have a NAS attached to an old Mac mini. When I buy a DVD I first rip it using Mac DVDRipper Pro which only extracts the movie itself without DRM. Then I use MetaMovie which uses a movie database on the internet to add cover picture, cast, director, rating, etc to the file. Then I use an Apple TV device attached to my TV for viewing. Ripping time on my old Mac is about 30 minutes.