Using the HP MediaSmart to Rip DVDs

I’ve been using an HP Mediasmart for the past several months to backup all my PCs, archive my massive photo collection and stream music to all of my media players. This week I found a very easy way to rip my DVDs to my HP MediaSmart EX487.

Over the years of built up quite a collection of personal DVDs from family events, vacations and weddings. As precious memories are, these DVDs are stored in my closet and rarely watched. I wanted him to have easier access to all these memories and be able to share them on demand.

Instead of using one of my notebooks to rip the DVDs, I decided to use my HP MediaSmart Server. A DVD takes up about 4.7 GB of hard drive space, which means it’s not practical for me to store every DVD I have on one of my notebooks. But 5 GB will hardly put a dent in the storage capacity of my home server. The HP media smart EX487 came with to 750 GB internal hard drives and two empty hard drive bays. I fill those empty bays with two 1.5 TB hard drives. I also plugged in an external 1.5TB hard drive to the server’s eSATA port and 2 TB external hard drive to one of the servers USB 2.0 ports. This means my HP MediaSmart server has a total capacity of 8 TB, or enough room to store more than 1,700 DVDs.

I found a Windows home server add-in called My Movies that makes it incredibly simple to copy DVDs directly it on to an HP MediaSmart server.

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After installing and configuring the My Movies, I plugged in the HP Blu-Ray drive that ships with the Pavilion dv2. I popped in a DVD and My Movies and the server went to work. After about 25 minutes the DVD ejected automatically, signaling that the duplication was completed.

All of the menus and chapters were intact, which means it looks and feels just like you have the DVD spinning inside of your computer.

I was able to watch my home movie on my Tablet PC, which does not have an internal DVD drive. External DVD drives are of course useful, but they are not ideal when you’re trying to share a video clip with families and friends at the dinner table or while sitting on a sofa.

The cool thing about this setup is that I can now rip my DVDs without really thinking about it. After the initial configuration you can rip two or three movies per hour by just placing the discs into the DVD drive. Copying DVDs takes a lot of computing resources and I prefer to have the server doing this work and freeing up my notebook’s memory and processor for other tasks.

In some countries, it is legal to copy Hollywood DVDs for personal use. If you’re willing to pay $100, you can install AnyDVD onto your HP MediaSmart Server so you can copy DVDs and Blu-Ray discs that you legally own.

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