This is the longest part of the process. Ripping your media to the computer. When I got an ipod years back, I ripped all of my cd's, so I didn't have to go thru that. Simple drag and drop to the media server. DVD's are another story. I for one was not a dvd fan. I would only buy them if I knew I would watch them more than one time. Therefore, I had about 60 dvds. I didn't have the same rule for my kids. We had about 40-50 for them. I proceeded to look for a dvd program that would make this process easy. I had a program called DVD Copy Pro. This I found out didn't work with Windows 7. So I had to search for something else. I found a free on trial program called DVD Fab. The trial was supposed to last 30 days, but I was able to erase and download it again many times, until I was actually done ripping all of my dvd's. It did finally stop working on me, but I liked it so much, I went ahead and bought it. Ripping 1 dvd takes up to 30 minutes, depending on the size. Just change them to an .avi or .wmv, whatever format you like and save them to the media center. I set up categories, Kids, Movies, TV shows, Documentaries, and sub-categories in each. Makes it a lot easier to view with the device I use to stream them, I explain this in a later post. So, you can do the math, 30 minutes, times 110 or so dvd's. It took a long time. I would spend my nights after the kids went to bed ripping dvd's, weekends, I would make sure there was one always working while I was doing weekend stuff. I finally finished and can now just do them one by one as I acquire them!
