My goal is simple I just don't how/if i can get there.

I have around 350 dvds and i'm just getting tired of the amount of shelf space they take up.  years ago i ripped all of my CDs to mp3s and imported them into itunes and my amazon cloud.  i'm quite happy to these digital versions allowing me to box up all my CDs and put them into storage.

Anyone know if can do the same thing with my dvds?  Ideally I would rip them all to some sort of external harddrive that both my ps3 and my eventual ps4 can see allowing me to play my entire library on either of my two tvs as a sort of "netflix" style library.

What file format is best for being able to be viewed on ps3/4?

What program works well to rip a dvd to hardrive?

are they any special things i can do to organize the files to make it easier to navigate and find my movies on ps3/4?  it would be awesome to have the movie covers as part of the metadata for browsing but my experiments with ps3's media player I just had file names.

For DVDs, many movies will not matter as the biggest DRM is in Bluray. However, you'll need something that will strip out the audio based DRM (can't remember what its called) in order for it to play without the disc.

Then you can just use the built-in media capabilities to stream from PC or copy to PS3/4 first then play.

I usually had .mp4 files for all of my digital content on my PS3.

WinX DVD Ripper might be a good program for that

PS3 (and surely PS4) supports .mp4, that's the container, make sure it uses h.264 as video codec
as for sound, well mp3 is easiest, but if you fancy surround sound you might want to try AAC or AVC codecs

I'm pretty sure the PS3 only supports certain bitrate-ranges for these codecs, but I have no idea which they are, so I guess you'll have to try around a bit (or use google yourself)

yeah, well i don't have a computer with blu-ray capabilities so i'm not going to worry about that for now.  my blu ray collection is only about 20 strong anyways so not such a big deal in the shelf space delio.

i'm not exactly sure what the media capabilities of the ps4 are (does anyone?) but i wasn't all that impressed with my media sharing my music collection to ps3.

..that and i had to download some software to my mac and have it running when i wanted my ps3 to see it.  that's a bit of a downer in terms of usability.  can i just have an external hardrive on the wifi and have it seen by the ps3?!   I can't copy to my ps3 as i've already maxed out my 500 Gb drive.  upgrading from 80 Gb was too much of a pain to upgrade it again.

thanks for the recommendations.

..i'll be doing my own google searches and stuff too but as dvd backups are strickly "legal" i thought i would try and get some trusted opinions first before i head off into the wild and get taken advantage of.  i'll look into WinX so thanks for the recommendation!

yeah... doing what you did with your CDs with your DVDs is more complicated and not quite as legal.

DVDFab plus Handbrake is a great free solution. Removes copy protection and then rips to h264 mp4 or mkv files. I just finished backing up all my dvds with this method.

that actually looks pretty much what i need.  about how long per disc on average to get to an .mp4?

Handbrake is what I use to convert movies to MP4 so that I can watch them on my ipod. It usually takes the length of the movie to convert it, or at least it does for me. For instance if a movie is an hour 30 minutes, then it will take an hour 30 minutes to convert, give or take a couple of minutes. Handbrake is a great program. Simple to use and it's free!

O.o

that long?  is winx faster?  i'll pay the $50 to convert things faster.  i've got like 1000 hours of movies.