Following on from my walkthrough on creating a home media PC using XBMC, I thought I’d focus on how exactly to build up your home media library in order to use the system.  A similar walkthrough is already available on the site for Mac users.

Before we begin, I must point out the following:-  Technically, it is still against the law to make a copy of a DVD that you own, be it by creating a digital backup, a copy of the disk, or even a transfer to a video cassette.  This is the same piece of out of date legislation that decrees that it is illegal to copy a CD onto a blank tape, or even convert a CD for MP3′s.  To my knowledge, no one has ever been prosecuted for any of these offences, and my personal opinion is that no one ever well (providing the copies you make are strictly for personal use!).  However, I must point out that I take no responsibility for any legal action that occurs as a result of using the methods detailed in this walkthrough.

What Do I Need?

For this walkthrough you will need a PC running Windows (XP, Vista or 7).  The PC must have a DVD drive and enough hard disk space to transfer the DVD to your computer and then encode it (10GB should be sufficient).  It’s worth noting that PC’s with faster processors will be able to complete this task much quicker than older PC’s with slower processors.

You will also need the following software:

• DivX Plus – Which allows your computer to read+play DivX (video) files
• Dr. DivX 2.0 OSS - Which converts DVD files to DivX files
• AC3Filter – Which allows your computer to recognise the audio on DVD’s
• DVDdecrypter- Which decodes the video files from the DVD and copies them to your hard disk

Once you have the above software installed on your computer (and have restarted), you are ready to begin!  Unlike the process for converting DVD’s on a Mac, this walkthrough is a two step process.  The first step will focus on copying the video files from your DVD to your PC and the second step will focus on converting the copied files into a smaller and easier to manage DivX file.

Step One – Decrypting the DVD files.

You may or may not be aware that the video files on DVDs are encrypted to prevent the DVD from being copied too easily, DVDdecrypter removes the encryption key from the video files and then copies the un-encrypted files to your PC.  The first thing to do is start your computer, insert your DVD and then open DVDdecrypter.  The screen you’re presented with should look like this:

To make things easier, the first thing we’re going to do is change the view of DVDdecrypter to make it a bit easier to see what’s on the DVD, click on “Mode” and then click on “IFO” the window should now look like this:

The next thing to do is to establish which file (or “stream”) in the right hand pane is the main feature film on the DVD, DVDdecrypter will automatically select the longest stream on the disk, which will normally be the feature film.  However, in some cases there may be “special features” on the DVD that have a longer run time than the actual movie, so it’s best to check the runtime against the runtime displayed in the small print on the back of the DVD case.

Once you are happy that the correct stream is selected in the right hand pane, click on the folder icon within the “destination” part of the left hand pane in order to select where you would like to copy the decrypted video files to:

If you are planning on copying alot of DVD’s, it might be an idea to create a folder on your hard drive specifically for this purpose, as above with the “DVD Temp” folder.  Once you select your destination, click OK and you will be back to the DVDdecrypter screen.  Once you’re back to the main screen, click on the large icon of a DVD and a hard disk in order to begin the decryption process:

This process can take sometime depending on your computer, if the DVD is damaged or has encryption that the software is unable to break then the process may appear to hang.  If this is a result of damage then there is little that can be done.  If the DVD is not damaged, however, then it may be possible to use another product called DVDfab to remove the encryption from your DVD.

Once the copying process is finished you will get a prompt indicating so (as well as a nice little jingle played over your speakers).  At this point we have a copy of the main DVD feature on your hard disk, which we will then compress into a DivX video file in step 2.

Step 2 – Encoding the DVD files into a DivX AVI File

In step one we copied the DVD feature film to our hard disk and removed the encryption key using DVDdecrypter.  The video files will actually play on your computer as they are, but a feature film will usually be spread across several files as Windows files can’t be larger than 2GB in size and most movies will be larger than this in DVD format.  In order to get a video file we can live with we need to encode the DVD files into a single DivX file which will be smaller in size and easier to transfer or stream between devices.

In the “What Will I Need” section it was suggested to install a program called Dr.Divx, it is this that we will be using to encode our video, so open up Dr.Divx and you’ll be presented with the following screen:

Click on the “Open” button to select the video files copied to your hard disk from your DVD:

Navigate to the directory you copied the DVD files to and then highlight all the files shown and click ok, Dr.DivX will then process the files and add them to the list in the left side of the screen:

You’ll notice a progres bar towards the top of the window that shows “Analysis”, this is the program checking the video files for consistency and working out the correct screen size etc.  Once this process is complete you can view stills from the movie in the right hand pane in order to ensure the software has done this correctly:

At this point we’re nearly ready to encode the file, before we do, check the left hand pane to ensure that the correct audio track and subtitle track are selected, usually these will be labelled so it’s easy to tell which is the correct track.  Once you are happy, click on the “Encode” button in the bottom right side of the window to go to the encoding screen:

This screen will show the encoding jobs currently in the queue, if you have more than one video to encode then you can click the “File” button at the top of the window to return to the main screen and add more jobs.  When you are ready to encode, click on the “Resume” button around the middle of the window and encoding will being:

Once this is completed the video has been successfully encoded and will be located (by default) in your “My Documents\My Videos\” Directory.  Rinse and repeat for any other DVD’s you need to copy!