Ripping DVDs

For the past month I’ve been slowly but steadily ripping my entire DVD collection onto my Media Center, so I have a gigantic digital scroll/search/rateable directory of my movies that I can simply browse through whenever I want to watch a movie (using MyMovies for Windows MCE).

It’s going to be really cool when it’s finally complete. But ripping a full-length movie with Magic DVD Ripper on my media center takes about 3 1/2 to 4 hours. So I’ve been ripping only about three or four of them per day, and I have…a lot of movies. I don’t really know how many DVDs I have, but it’s well over a hundred.

Yesterday it occurred to me that I could probably start ripping movies on my new beastie as well, thus doubling my movie-ripping output. And then it occurred to me that I could also use my brother’s computer since he’s out of town. Triple the movie-ripping output!

you see where this is going?

So now I have four computer simultaneously ripping DVDs, and my beastie rips them more than twice as fast as my media center (about 1:25 for a full movie), so in the past day I’ve ripped 11 movies instead of the usual 4.

Why didn’t I think of this before? I might actually finish before the end of the week!