Operation: digitize physical media

I've doing it for a long time with CDs, I suspect many people have, converting all my physical media to iTunes (or whatever format you happen to support). There are lots of reasons for it but generally the biggest driver is to have out music on the go and easily organized into those fantastic things known as playlists and genres.

Now the iPad and the AppleTV are my main sources of video content I've made the decision to digitize all my video media as well. The hardest decision was really which format to convert to. I'd originally embarked down the VOB or ISO path due to the speed of transfer and using the ATVFlash Nito plug-in to play them. The biggest problem with this is that you need to have a different interface and half my content is only available in each interface. There iso format doesn't allow for any meta data so a lot of the searching advantages are lost (this is important on 500+ movies) and I can't use them on any of the mobile devices I have.

So I've settled on the iTunes compatible MP4 format. It's a slow process though. Even with 3 machines running compressions it's going to take a while. I'm obviously prioritizing any that I'm yet to watch and all the kids movies (for obvious reasons). The interface on the AppleTV is brilliant for navigation on the TV so it makes sense that all the movies are accessible there especially all my new movie purchases are from iTunes.

I'm using the ATVflash to give my AppleTV access to 2TB storage so I can keep most of the library available even when my Media server is offline. The only thing left on the list is to get a DROBO to give the Media server some redundancy and easily upgradable storage.

Sent from my iPhone