How do you store movies in HDD?

How do you store movies collection in your hard disk drive?

It's not clear what you're asking. Are you asking for file format, organizational tips, or what?

Are you asking for instructions on how to pirate copyrighted material?

Yes.

You're on your own for that.

Google. Because we're not allowed to discuss ways of pirating. Now, if you want to know about how to download legal public domain movies, that might be different and we can talk about that (I believe).

Yeah, I'm not sure "how to store" would be read by anyone as "how to download." Regardless, while I don't really care much what people do on their own "time," because of its illegality I ask that people not discuss how to pirate films in public here. Thanks.

I don't download or pirate movies but I do back up all the movies I own to a hard drive and it's pretty simple. If that's illegal (which I'm sure it is) oh well, I've been doing stuff like that since the 70's when I would put my 45's on cassette tapes.

I always think of you as much younger, it must be those youthful avatars We must be around the same age.

I back up my 1 tb hardrive onto a Seagate 1.5 tb external storage drive. Trusting just a hardrive with movies (or anything) is just to risky. I should really have Santa bring me another storage drive.

I know you do.
I have two 4tb hard drives and one 8 tb hard drive. The 8tb has everything - special features, the movie, everything and is only for storage and I still have plenty of space on it. The only time I hook it up is to add to it. One of the 4tb's has all my movies in compressed form for use on the little tv upstairs the other has the movies only, uncompressed, for big screen viewing downstairs and that one is pretty much full.

How do you compress your movies? I was thinking of doing that to some of my files and tried doing it with Handbrake but that seemed to take a long time.

That's what I use and it does take a long time. No way around it as far as I know. It took a long time to get through all my movies. I do keep the quality high which takes longer but I was able to get The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo down from 36 gb to 3 gb and it looks fine on a smaller tv (40 inch).

36gb OMG, that's huge! No wonder you need all that storage. I grouse about my files when they are over 1.5 gb. I read that FFmpeg can do file compression pretty fast and over all quality remains good. It does have to be done from a command prompt as I don't think there's a GUI for it.

No idea what that means or how to do it

Dragon Tattoo is the most extreme example I have. Most Blu Rays seem to be about 15 to 20 gb and compress to about 2 or 3gb. Dvd's get really small. I can't remember if I even compressed them but Zombieland on dvd is sitting in my library at 616mb.

Well, in essence, you are doing exactly the same thing as those who make and distribute pirated copies. With one small difference - you don't distribute the copied films to other people who, for one reason or another, can't afford to purchase a licensed copy.

I'd call that a very large difference.

I'm also deeply skeptical that most of the time people pirating are doing it because they can't afford any of the films.

That said, we've had the discussion about the ethics (or lack thereof) of pirating films in a few other threads, which I can direct people to if it's something they'd like to discuss.

Use software called handbrake to rip your Blu Ray discs to .mkv files. But as soon as you compress them you're audio will be comprimised. Therefore a 1 to 1 rip is better although as discussed file size will be huge. If you don't care, then it's a good option to compress, but going from DTS or Dolby atmos to something like AAC 5.1 or 2.0 is a dealbreaker for some. There could be a reduction in picture quality too.

Shove the files on a network drive, then use the amazing Odroid N2+ to play them via beautiful Kodi on a 4K TV.

Job done.

If I'm doing exactly same thing with one small difference then I'm not doing exactly the same thing.

I use 1s and 0s.

Forgive me: I couldn’t help myself.

When you compress a video what settings do you change in Handbrake? There's a lot of different settings, wow! Do you change most or just a few of them? I'm trying to figure out what's the best and quickest method for compressing video files.