I discovered the DVD Library plug-in to Beyond Media through the SnapStream forums, and immediately decided it was a great way to get my DVD archive online. Not only does it make the DVD titles more accessible, but not having to handle the DVDs themselves reduces wear-and-tear on them over their lifetime. But soon after starting to archive our DVDs on my HTPC's hard drive, I realized I could save myself a lot of time and energy if there were a way to automate the operation. This webpage documents the process I came up with.

The first thing I built was the batch script to call DVD Decrypter in batch (non-interactive) mode, which is an extremely handy feature that made this entire method possible:

[DISC_LABEL] gets replaced inline with the DVD's volume label. Refer to the link below for the full list of command-line switches supported by DVD Decrypter. When executed, this batch file invokes the DVD Decrypter GUI, rips the DVD found in the source drive (Z: in my example script), then auto-closes on completion of the rip. Make sure your destination directory for the DVD images is a subdirectory of your DVD Library installation, which ensures any new titles will be detected by DVD Library the next time you run an update.

I use AnyDVD to limit the DVD drivespeed to 4X, so it doesn't whine like a jet engine during the rip -- speed isn't all that important for this function, IMHO. Destination can be any mapped drive or (I think) a UNC pathname, so you could dump the VOBs directly to a network share just as easily.

I then created a shortcut to the newly created ripdvd.cmd batch file and dropped it into C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\SnapStream\Beyond Media\Shortcuts, which enables that script to appear as a menu item in Beyond Media. You can drop a PNG image file with the same filename as the shortcut into the IconCache subdirectory, and BM will use it as the icon for that menu item. Coincidentally, I chose the yellow-and-black radioactive icon for my "Rip DVD" menu item before the DVD burning plugin was released for BTV.

Here's the obligatory screenshot showing off the finished product:

Once the DVD has been ripped to disk, DVD Decrypter exits automatically, and it's simply a matter of searching for the new title in DVD Library, which I still do manually, so I can ensure it makes a correct title match, selects the proper cover art, etc.

And that's basically it. This was as close as I could get to a fully automated DVD archiving utility that could be run from BM using just the remote, and it's worked very well for me. If you try it out for yourself, be sure to drop me a note and let me know how it worked for you.

• Command-line options to DVD Decrypter
• SS forum post describing how to add menu items and icons to BM