Carl Hutzler's Blog

A few weeks ago, I borrowed a robotic DVD/CD duplication machine (made by Primera Technologies) from one of my clients. As of the first of the year, Primera released some software that would allow the machine to be used for CD ripping (instead of burning). I thought this was great and I could finally rip the rest of my 4000 CDs into iTunes. Over a period of 2 weeks or so, I ripped everything at a fairly high bit rate. Great! I was almost done….well, not quite.

So over the years, my wife and I have purchased music online, ripped books on tape, and accumulated a fairly large library of music that was in addition to our tangible CD collection. So now that I had the CD’s ripped, I needed to combine the libraries somehow. I knew that some of the music in our current iTunes library had been ripped from our CD collection originally so I could not just combine them straight away. So what I had was a big mess of stuff which if I just consolidated them in iTunes, would result in many duplicate songs.

What I did was a multi-step process which I think could be streamlined if I had some more time and/or was a bit stronger in Unix. But here it is if it helps someone with the same issue. One note: I thought about trying to use iTunes and the library file structure for this, but I could not find a way to do it due to the issue I had on my hands. I was trying to stay away from duplicate songs which iTunes does a poor job of managing unless you are actively ripping a CD where itunes does warn you. Too bad they don’t have this for moving files around.

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First things first!
This is a tutorial on how to rip DVDs you own and not how to steal movies!

That said, there is a legitimate need to be able to take DVDs you own and turn them into files that can be streamed/played, installed on your iPod or iPhone, or used with an AppleTV or other media device. This is a tutorial on how I do it for one of my clients along with a script I customized to make the whole process easy.

The set-up I have for one of my clients is a central Mac Mini server (headless – no keyboard/monitor/mouse) which we use for the iTunes server. It runs iTunes all the time and does not do much of anything else. We have a number of AppleTV’s on the network and each of them is paired with the iTunes library on the Mac Mini server. This set-up allows my client to play/stream any music or movies in the iTunes library on any AppleTV. This works well for their purposes.

The issue I needed to solve for my client was to make it easy to rip all of their media/content into iTunes. Automating the music ripping was easy as iTunes has built in preferences for automating the ripping of music. Just go to iTunes preferences and tell it to rip a music CD when one is inserted in the Mac Mini and when complete, eject it. Done.

But what about DVD movies? Read more