Burning our movies to the hard drive.

Hey, everyone! Wanted to see if someone could assist me with this as I'm not really seeing much online (sorry...not the most computer savvy).

Anyhow, we have a new iMac (1.5 years old) with plenty of storage, including a 1TB harddrive back up. We have a pretty large collections of CDs (over 600) and DVDs (over 200). I've since ripped all of our CDs to the harddrive for easy transfer to iPhones as well as being able to put the CDs in storage and free up space in the house.

Now we're looking to do the same thing with our DVDs, none of which are Blu-Ray. What we'd like to do is rip them to the hard drive so we can store them. However, these will present a slightly different challenge in that we would like to be able to watch them on our TV in the living room as well. We do have an Airport Extreme hooked up to the computer. And our TV is a newer one, currently hooked up to our Comcast box as well as the Xbox 360 and PS3.

So to simplify:

1) Easiest way to copy our DVD collection to the Mac
2) Easiest way to view it on the TV

Thanks in advance for any help and let me know what else you may need as I'm guessing there's more info that may help.

WE would love to help you, but due to US law, advice on ripping commercial DVDs is not allows on the forum

Ah. Didn't even think of that. I do have a digital copy of a couple of movies already on my computer (from buying the DVD). Is there a way to view them at least?

I can answer the "easiest way to view on TV" part: buy an Apple TV unit ($99).

As for the digital copies you got from DVDs: if they are "ultra-violet" type digital copies, they probably won't work with anything. Call up Flixster or whoever and ask for an iTunes code so you can get something that will actually work with your devices.

If they are straight MPEG-4 digital copies, then simply adding them to iTunes should work fine and they can then be synced or viewed on your devices.