DVD Backup/Archive - Mactheripper, handbrake? What do you do?

[trip221]

So I've been backing up some of my DVD's with Mactheripper and just ripping the whole DVD. I didn't really plan ahead, and at about 7gigs per DVD my hard drive space is running out quickly.

My original thoughts were that by ripping the whole DVD with MTR I could use handbrake to dumb it down to put on ipods. And with VLC it's easy enough to watch any DVD straight from the macbook to the TV.

What do you guys do to backup your DVD's that uses a more reasonable amount of space while maintaining decent quality and ability to import to iTunes for ipod use, etc?

 

[pjarvi]

I compress all my DVDs using an Elgato Turbo.264 hardware encoder with the AppleTV setting, since that's the primary device I play all my movies on.

You can just use Handbarake for the same purpose, but how much you want to compress them is really dependent on what devices you want to use them with. If you like having the full rip from the DVD, I would recommend just getting an external drive to store them on.

Doing 2 encodes may be an option for you, one for iPod/iPhone the other for Optimum quality based on other's recommendations. The 2 encodes combined should still end up being smaller than the original DVD (probably a little over 2GB total).

There's plenty of threads about Handbrake encodes in the AppleTV forum, you might want to swing by there for some more recommendations.