Kodi Community Forum

Had a few questions as I am new to xmbc. Pease forgive my ignorance I did begin researching this and I am sure I will ask very easy questions that I should have found in the research already so I apologize now lol.

I was looking into building my first htpc today and am having a hard time deciding if I want to build it powerful enough to do light gaming etc. So I decided it probably makes sense to hold off building the htpc while i figure out what i want besides my dvd collection, Netflix, Hulu, etc. Not to mention that will give time for the Haswell line to come out. In the mean time I wanted to see if there is any issue building my library for xmbc prior to actually building the htpc. I currently have a very decent gaming pc that should be able to be much faster at ripping etc then the htpc will be able to do. So that makes me wonder is there any reason I can't buy a 2-4 gb external drive and start ripping my home DVD collection to that drive then use that drive later for the htpc? Should I install xbmc on my current pc to make the process complete?

I was thinking I could rip 30 of my DVD's or so at a time to iso or mkv then setup handbrake to que them and convert them to mp4. If I then put all the mp4's into a folder and point xbmc to them will it build that as a library with all the meta dating getting pulled down etc?

I wouldn't use MP4's for a start. I'd use Handbrake to convert them to MKV's as this container has far more flexibility.

Depending how you structure your library, it may just go across but worst case and export and import will fix it.

Yeah, I'd start ripping now. When I first started ripping my library I would have every computer that had a DVD drive be ripping :)

Handbrake makes it very easy, too.

If you make sure to use proper filenames, XBMC can scrape them.

I think it would be a good idea to read through Adding_videos_to_the_library (wiki) to get a good idea of the naming conventions that give you the best results.
For movies I would advice placing every movie in its own folder, with the movietitle as foldername.