I’ve finally collected all the necessary software to put the finishing touches on my custom-built DVD Server. The hardware is still up in the air, but fortunately, I have a friend with the necessary hardware who has been acting as my guinea pig for the perfect, completed system.

But of course, this begs the question, what is a DVD server?

A DVD Server, simply put, is a single machine that holds one’s entire movie collection stored in a digital format, and can play them all.

The objective for this particular machine was lofty. I wanted it to store every movie as a disc image file. This simply means that I would have one file that represented the entire disc and, when played would have all menus, audio tracks, and special features still intact. It would also have a library system that would allow one to browse through the movies. And, most of all, it would be built on all open source software.

I had two of these things. But today I found the last piece of the puzzle. The library software.

It’s a program called GCStar. It allows to create entries for all of your movies. Moreover, it queries the Internet Movie Database to get all extra information, including director, running time, ratings and, most of all, cover art.

The ripping program is called k9copy. It took a bit of doing to get it set up properly. This isn’t a guide (yet), so I won’t go through all the details, but suffice to say it’s required you find quite a few various codecs in order to rip commercial DVDs.

And finally, VLC Media Player for playing back the movies. This program is extremely flexible and will play just about every format known to man. And several known to monkeys. Including .iso files, which is the format that the DVDs rip into.

Additionally, the .iso files are a standard disc file format. Meaning it’s very simple to burn an .iso to a disc. Just about every operating system comes with a program for burning an .iso to a disc standard.

GCStar allows you to accompany a video file to your movie library entries, and choose a default program to play it. Meaning that, once your library is imported, GCStar is the only program you need to start manually.

The entire machine is built on open source software. Which means that all of the software used here is free to download and modify. The only cost is the hardware, which admittedly can get expensive for large movie collections. My friend (who has the hardware) has a movie collection in the hundreds. He bought a Terabyte hard drive. For starters.

I’d love to do a guide, sometime, on how to set up this DVD server set up. But for now, I’m quite pleased that the software library is finally complete. Now all I need to do is get an HDTV so that I can finally hook it up to something besides this dinky little monitor.

Oh, and did I mention that it’s running Ubuntu, equipped with the Compiz Fusion window environment? Which means, yes…my desktop is a cube.

Sweetness