Well just went out and picked up a HP m7480n what do you guys think of this product? any recommendations or tips and tricks for Media Center.. i am a total noob to it all

 

anyone have any good info on how to shrink DVD's onto the harddrive??

 

You want to rip your dvd collection to your hd?

 

yeah.. thats the goal.. this Windows Media Center kicks ***, and I have 500 Gigs available for it

 

You have to get a dvd ripper program off the internet. They don't sell them in stores, even to make perfectly legitimate copies of your own dvds. You can start googling "dvd ripping" and other similar variations and see what you come up with. I'll put up the name of what I use later, but I don't have it on this compu. I think it is "IM Too" or IMToo dvd ripper. It works pretty well. I think I paid $24 for it, but there is a fair amount of shareware out there to do the job.

 

how small did it shrink down your DVD's too?

 

I don't think I have them compressed, but I didn't put all of my dvds on a hd. I"ll bet most of them(before I converted them to mp4s for my psp) are between 300-500MB.

 

I don't watch movies on my compu, so you are doing a whole different thing than I did. I don't know what compression would do to the vid/audio quality.

 

hmm I am hoping somebody will chime in soon.. I am doing it because the New HTPC is hooked up to the TV and Projector via Media Center.. (Which kicks ***)

 

I see that you still didn't get any help. If you are just watching movies the way you described, then you don't need to rip the dvds to your hd - just play them in your compu's dvd player. But if you want to rent movies and watch them later off of your hd, then you can try this - http://www.imtoo.com/

There are shareware programs as well. They all have different formats and interfaces.