I"m new to the site but ripping for a few months I have a seagate 1tb hd with about 230 movies on it but it's full now is it any way to make the movie files way smaller so i can add alot more movies or am i screwed? Ty in advance for any help that can be given.
Hi, by making the files smaller , usually picture quality goes down. If that is ok with you, the best option is dvd rebuilder. It retains the best quality for reduced file sizes. Hope this helps, Jo
I use DVD Rebuilder for all my movies to burn to DVD. For movies i want to keep on hard drives (for playing thru xboxes ie thru Xbox Media Centre) I convert DVD's to AVI using AutoGK (free), i use AutoGK to shrink my movies down to 1.4GB which is a very good trade between quality and size.
hey creaky after u cut them down to that small can the be burnt back to dvd with all options and functions menus stuff like that ,sorry for so many questions guys.
As i say, i use DVD Rebuilder for re-encoding any DVD movies that are being burnt back to DVD. I use programs such as AutoGK to shrink said DVD movies (that have already been re-encoded by DVD Rebuilder) that are intended to be kept on hard drives for adhoc viewing, where the trade-off between quality and size is sufficient for just watching the movies. I also 'obtain' AVI movies that are between 700MB and 1.4GB, some are even 2GB and these are more than watchable as they are, and stay stored on hard drives as are so small. I sometimes convert these obtained AVI's to DVD as am personally more than happy with the quality of the AVI's once converted to DVD, but other people will have different opinions. (I don't bother converting DVD's to AVI and back to AVI for burning to DVD, that's a complete waste of time and effort, i only convert obtained AVI's to DVD). For movie watching I don't always want to waste time hunting for DVD's, i prefer to just flick on an xbox and watch an AVI; whilst i like my backup DVD's to be of the best quality i can achieve (hence why i use DVD Rebuilder), when it comes to actual movie watching i'm more than content to watch AVI quality, after all i'm watching the movie for the story as opposed to the quality of the backup copy. Basically my backups are of the best quality purely for archival, but for general movie watching it's far quicker to point an xbox towards an AVI.
Have a read thru this and see what you think (it's dead easy to use really) ~ http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/dvd_to_avi_using_autogk.cfm
