I haven't bought a bluray reader yet so I was wondering how big (estimate?) the video file will be after ripping it? assuming I only want to keep English audio/English subs?
Well a full and complete rip is often around 36 to 44 Gig for most major titles. A few are less than 20 gig. A stripped down version that started at say 40+ gig will end up at around 25 gig. This will have the main movie only in full HD video, standard 5.1 Audio (DD or DTS) in one language and subtitles in one language. A strip and rip (at the same time) usually takes about 1hour 15mins. You will need AnyDVD HD and i recommend Clown BD for the slimming process. In storage terms for back-ups your really looking at getting a 1TB HDD which are quite cheap now. If you have other HDD's available this would help speed up the striiping process so your not reading and writing to the same destination.
So basically in order to achieve lower than ~25GB, I would have to sacrifice video and/or audio quality, correct? I was hoping to find a way to achieve ~10GB per movie while maintaining very good video quality. Speed doesn't bother me much, I would probably just leave it overnight.
Mostly definately. A fair few disks end up just under or around 25Gig. I would guesstimate around 35-40% of them. To maintain HD quality you either need to burn to 50 gig disks (where larger file sizes are encountered) or forget burning to disk altogether and play the back-ups from the PC HDD or some other kind of external storage / media box. There are methods to get a blu down to DVD-9 and in my experiance, the re-encoding takes a very long time and for me the result was ok, but I reckon the original DVD would have been slightly better. Other users would argue but at the end of the day, Bluray is not the massive jump in quality that the industry was shouting about and it seems to have taken huge steps (particularly in file size) to acheive the differnece to DVD, therfore, any reduction of the HD Movie file size will be detrimental to the enchanced viewing experiance over and above DVD quality. I run my back-ups from the PC and I have it in another room from the TV. Therfore it can be a noisy fan driven gaming rig, that can handle HD with ease and the software packages i use enable me to use it like a HTPC when I want to, including remote control, surround audio, Media centre style interfaces with movie backdrops, thumbnail images and all those bells and whitles. Give it some more thought before you dive in.
Yeah my PC is connected to my 46" HDTV, that's why I was interested in blu-ray. I'll probably just wait until high storage HDD are cheaper then/
