your welcome.

but can't you just dig something out of your closet out there?
i know its a hush hush area your at but still that is to be far advanced then us here on this little ol planet.

Thx for the update rovingcowboy, well I could be one of the testers, if and when it comes out !!

DVD's Movies, Video's and other formats of those type is getting some support in version 4 of mediamonkey just when it is going to be relesased is anyones guess. not sure when the beta or alpha testing is going to start either.

Does MediaMonkey allow the ability to catalog movie files ? Mostly been doing my music collection only.

As for DVD backups/ripping I use DVDFab (highly recommend) which has the ability to make many types of portable movie files.

I have been ripping movies even before DVDFab existed with other tools, i.e. DVD Decrypter, etc. But now I'm thinking of NOT making DVD backups any longer.

If MM allows the ability to catalog movie files and store Art Work and finding similar to the "Batch Art Finder" that would make me move to using NAS (network attached storage) for storing my movie collection.

Any info regarding this would be greatly appreciated.

so its fast that is good. how many hd's do you have that are larger then 120 gbs and totaly empty. that you can use for the ripping process. the more empty space you have the faster it will go.

you can also tell the other cpus to do the work and let the 1,2 cores for your use. just get a program to control the cpu cores and use it to make the 3 and 4 cpu cores do only the video stuff. but remember that only works on the cpu both operations would use the ram so playing music and editing music on one and two would take ram from three and four which would need it more then the music programs would.
so its not really fast as every one seems to be making it out to be.

on the other hand there are ways to get it without ripping. but thats labor intensive and uses mulitple hardware to do it. so best to let the companys make the dvd's and buy them from them. plus it keeps people working.

Hmmm, now I'm wondering if I even want to go through the trouble of ripping dvd's. I had bought my mom a few box sets of classic television programs comprising ~20-30 discs in total and I was thinking of ripping them all and uploading them to a digital media player, but ugh! It's beginning to sound like the process could take weeks or months.

For the record, my computer's a laptop, quadcore, 6gigs of memory, windows vista, etc so it's not old, but still. Maybe a regular old dvd player's the answer.

FYI. video ripping is long and slow if you pick high detail. if you have a older system that has smaller hd's like 80 gbs and a smaller pent 3 or pent 4 when they were only 2.5 ghrz then you are going to be in for an evenlonger time to do it.
video is not as easy as muisc.

for example the movie monster's inc. the fur on sully was done using up to if i remember right 35 computers all networked together and running for 18 days to get it to production quailty in a 5 minute scene.

so it is not easy doing video. but still that was an old movie and the hardware is so much faster now.

still it has to do the same things as then so the more you have the longer it takes. this computer uses intervideo winDVD creator. and is slow about 20 minutes for an 30 minute scene but i have dual cpu and maxed out ram for this. so it runs faster then on the old dell. shucks that old dell would not even do video cause it was too slow with a 2.45 ghrz pent 4 and only had 768 mbs' of ram.

anydvd is all you need, it can rip to ISO or video ts folder. The HD version also supports blueray/hd-dvd ripping.

if you want to shrink the dvd's down to single layer (~4.5 gig), then google for dvd shrink and use it with anydvd.

I'm not a big movie fan but now that I've bought a few dvd's for a family member I'm finding out that ripping dvd's is not as intuitive as ripping cd's. Can anyone recommend good software? I don't mind paying. Also, this is a stupid question I'm sure, but is dvd ripping done in real time? I just sampled a trial version of a ripping program and it seems it took about 20 minutes to transfer a clip of the same length.