How To: Rip DVDs to build a movie jukebox home theater server

Want to play your video collection on any media extender, console or AppleTV? Step one is to get your movies off of the DVDs and onto your hard drive! If you're like most people you probably have a huge library of DVDs that you've bought and collected over the years. Unfortunately, it's an inconvenient format if you want to playback all that content anywhere around the house. So, learn how to rip and encode that stack of DVDs into a format that you can play on your Windows Media Extender, set top box like the Video Popcorn Hour, PS3, Xbox 360, or AppleTV. All you need is fast machine mac or PC and some free apps.

For Mac owners, checkout HandBrake.

For PC owners, your choices are bit more varied. Along with the PC version of HandBrake, you can also use the AutoGK. It's a GUI front end for a several different open source video transcoding tools that let you harness their power without the tedious need to jump from one app to another each time. AutoGK is great especially for fans of DivX and Xvid encoding. Finally there's AutoMKV. Like AutoGK, AutoMKV is a GUI front end for various tools that are used. The benefit of AutoMKV is it's higher level of tweakability and output format diversity.

And if you run into unexpected problems VideoHelp.com offers a wealth of resources and advice for any video encoding, transcoding or formatting issue.

Be sure to check out the second part of this two-part tutorial to learn how to build a movie, music, and media server!

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