HTPC file server software

jayn_j

Press On Regardless
Original poster
Supporting Founder
Sep 29, 2003
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Sheboygan, WI
It has been a few years since this was last active, so I thought I'd start fresh.

My son has finally shed the PC I originally bought to be a HTPC. He grabbed it out of the box before I got home from work and held on tight for 4 years. Now that he needs better gaming, I can finally have it :)

The PC has been upgraded over the years. Processor is older, I believe a core 2 duo. Graphics is a good card from about 3 years ago. Has 4 TB of HDD and 8 GB of RAM. Has a combo BR/HD-DVD drive. It is currently running windows 8.1

I would like to repurpose this as a media server. Not concerned with TV, although it does have a tuner card. I would just like to rip my BluRays and especially my HD-DVDs to make them more accessible around the house.

I believe I can use the various TIVOs and BluRay players as playback devices and just use this as a file server. What software do I need to make this happen? I guess at a bare minimum I need some sort of program to extract movies from the discs and store it as a common media file. The one I am familiar with in the past is AnyDVD. Is this still a good choice, or are there better ones available? What else will I need? Is there some sort of cataloging that works with the other playback devices?

I know next to nothing on this subject, so any help is appreciated.
 
A Blu-ray is about 30g and a regular DVD is about 9g. Takes a lot of drive space to store movies. I ripped my dvds with DVD Shrink and stored them at about 4.5g each. I have two Linksys NAS300 with 4TB each full of movies as a server. My Blu-rays are stilled played from the HTPC blu-ray drive. I do not wish to compress the files there.
 
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