How-To: Turn Your Mac mini into a DVD Jukebox
Introduction
In our DVD Kiosk How-To, we configured our Mac mini to function as a DVD player. But what if you want to do away with the platters and store your movies on your hard drive? If iTunes allows you keep your CDs in the closet forever, so why not do the same with your DVDs?
Alas, storing DVDs on your hard drive isn’t as straighforward as ripping a CD. Simply put, movies are huge. An industry DVD weighs in at a maximum 8.5GB. Hard drives for the mini currently cost about $1 per gigabyte, so storing that DVD could cost as much as $8.50 in hard drive space—about half what you paid for the DVD. (By comparison, you can stuff 13 raw CDs in that same 8.5GB, or 150-200 audio CDs converted to to MP3 or AAC formats.) This value calculation has prevented any kind of iTunes-for-movies from gaining mass acceptance. But the pieces are out there to crack this nut, and we'll show you how.
There are two general approaches storing your DVDs on the hard drive:
DVD Rip, Easy and Big
It is easy to make a perfect copy of a DVD on hard drive.
If you open a DVD in the Finder, inside is a VIDEO_TS folder, possibly an AUDIO_TS folder and a number of other items—it depends on how many extra features are on the disc. Drag the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders to your hard drive. It takes about 15 minutes to copy a DVD to the mini’s hard drive, depending on the speed of the optical and hard disks.
To play the movies in DVD Player, select Open VIDEO_TS Folder in DVD Player's File menu. Navigate to the copied VIDEO_TS folder and your movie will play just as if from the DVD. Easy, free, and no additional software is needed. (This is a popular temporary option for laptop owners who want to watch their movie on the plane without eating up the battery by spinning the DVD.) The movie will occupy 4-8GB of your hard drive’s space. Even 80GB mini owners can expect to only store about 10 movies on their hard drive this way, but you’ll have something that is virtually indistinguishable from the DVD itself.
Note: The Finder-copy method may not work on all DVDs, or on all computers. We’ve successfully tested many, many DVDs, but we’ve also seen Finder fail to copy some and DVD Player refuse to play others.
DVD Rip, Challenging but Small
If you’re willing to give up some video quality (even a tiny bit), and a bit of your time, you can convert your DVD into a further-compressed video format. There are no free lunches here, so each user must consider what they’re willing to give up. Even a small sacrifice in quality can yeild space savings of 50% or more. Keep in mind, the video conversion is slow. Expect the conversion to take between two and twelve hours, depending on the destination format, the length of the movie, and the options you set for the process.
Fair warning: selecting among the options for this reduction isn’t easy. There are utilities to help you along, but you’ll quickly run into terminology that’ll make you wonder if you’re saving a movie or attempting time travel.
We take you through the process of putting the DVDs on your mini and playing them back. However, since we have two processes that are so distinctly different in terms of user expectations, we must keep one goal in mind: while we might be willing to learn a ton of stuff and wade through a how-to to do this, your spouse/kids/parents/guests will not. The end result needs to be no more difficult to use than a DVD player.
First, we look at the options for moving VIDEO_TS files from the DVD to your hard disk, how to browse and play them back, and how to do each with a remote control.