Techie help: ditching the DVD collection to move to hard drive (1 Viewer)

[bamalamafizzfazz]

Hello chaps/ chapettes,

I am looking for some advice.
I have a pretty extensive DVD collection and I have the intention of ripping them all off and putting them on an external hardrive allowing me to chuck them up in the loft and save living room space.
I am capable of technical stuff but the final operations have to be pretty simple so that the Mrs can still watch stuff when I am not there.
Ripping them is no problem as I know fully how to do this.
I want advice regarding the best means of watching them as video files from a hard drive. I do have a PS3 which I could watch the films through, is this the best idea or does anyone have any other suggestions?
Has anyone used a media centre thingy with built in HD? Are they any good?
What about the Apple TV? can you connect a drive to that?
Wireless? I am open to suggestions.
Your advice is appreciated. Cheers.

 

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[Nick]

Put them on an external hard drive and plug it in to the ps3 Job done!

 

[Houchens Head]

Put them on an external hard drive and plug it in to the ps3 Job done!

I stick all my films on a 1TB external hard drive. I then watch them through my large screen TV via my laptop (which is attached via an HDMI cable). I ain't got a ps3 or game thingy so I can't answer which is best, but my movies show in great quality!

 

[Houchens Head]

Just going on from my previous post, I converted all my home videos (which I've saved over the years - holidays and suchlike - no porn!!) and stuck them all onto my external hard drive. With a terrabyte of memory, I can store loads as well as my converted DVD's and if that ever gets full, I will just buy another one. They only cost about £55 for a 1TB or £80 for 2TB or £130 for 3TB which is MASSIVE. (Maplins prices) When you consider an average movie is just under 800mb, that is a lot of movies stored!

 

[Jack Griffin]

Recommend you back them up mate, all hard drives fail eventuallly.

 

[ICHAN]

I have had 2 go so good advice from JG, the latest one to go I have sent back but all the stuff I had on there has gone so to speak but luckily I learned my lesson and had it all else where.

 

[We'll_live_and_die]

If you put them onto a 500gb flash drive, then you can plug this straight into the tele using the USB port. That's the absolute easiest option. Personally i've got my computer wired up to a projector and watch em thru that.

 

[chiefdave]

You might want to think about getting something like a ReadyNAS which will give you a mirrored hard drive so if one drive fails you haven't lost everything (still worth backing up every now and then just to be safe!). i've got one of those connected to my PS3 and stream from there in HD with no problems at all. If your Mrs can use the PS3 for games or anything else she'll have no problem using it to stream films.