WD My Book Mirror Edition (2 TB)

Those that know me know that I have quite a large amount of storage space when it comes to the hard drives inside and attached to my computer. Ever since I learned that you could stream videos from a PC to an Xbox 360 over the local network, I started ripping my DVDs and converting them to MPEG-4 video files. Using Microsoft's Zune software I now share my entire video, music & photo collection with my Xbox 360. Although I'm not quite finished converting all my DVDs, I have converted well over 250 movies and at least 2 dozen seasons' worth of episodes of television shows. This makes it quite handy when wanting to watch a DVD because now we don't have to dig it out of our tightly packed cabinet of DVDs.

To handle that storage space I recently purchased a new external hard drive. Sure, I could have kept the data on my internal RAID array, but that space was soon to be full. Then there's the problem of moving my data to a new computer some time in the future. Eventually I'm going to have to copy the video files off of the internal drives to move them. I figured that since these video files aren't changed at all over time (I just rip them once and then they're basically read-only files) that an external drive would suffice. Over the local network, a USB 2.0 speed is plenty to be able to stream these files to my Xbox 360 for viewing.

The hard drive I chose was the new My Book Mirror Edition (2 TB) from Western Digital. This drive allows me to run it in a 1 TB RAID 1 array (which I am) to give me some redundancy in the event of hardware failure. The drive sits nicely on my desk and is just as quiet, if not quieter than my other external hard drive (320 GB Maxtor One Touch).

DVD -> Video -> Xbox 360

Converting DVD's to Xbox 360 compatible video format and sharing them over your network with your Xbox 360

Step 1 - Make an ISO image
The first thing I do is to rip a DVD into an ISO image on my hard drive, removing the encryption in the process. I do that with DVD Shrink. Sometimes if that doesn't work, due to some newer encryption algorithms out there, I'll use DVD Fab, which will store the DVD in a file format on your hard drive, which I then use DVD Shrink to open the files and rip to an ISO image from that.

Step 2 - Mount ISO image in virtual drive
To do this I use a free virtual drive program, Alcohol 52%. Alcohol 52% allows you to have up to 6 virtual drives. They make a more robust version, Alcohol 120% which allows up to 32 virtual drives, but I find 6 is usually more than enough. That, and Alcohol 120% costs $$$.

Step 3 - Convert DVD movie to video file
There are different video editing programs out there that can do this. Personally, I like to use Nero Recode (part of the Nero 7 Ultimate package). Video formats that can be shared with an Xbox 360 can be found here. Using the MPEG-4 H.264 codec, Nero can recode the movies up to an 8 Mbps bitrate. This is plenty big. Personally I recode my stuff to 2 Mbps at 720x400 resolution. This results in a pretty good quality movie while keeping the file sizes down a bit.
For a 45 minute TV episode, the video file is about 700 MB in size. Not bad, especially with how cheap hard drive space is now. I'm actually looking at picking up a 1 TB external hard drive sometime to store my DVD collection on. Then I can browse and watch shows without having to find the discs.
UPDATE - I found a free version of Nero Recode here.

Step 4 - Share your video files over your network
Depending on what video file codec you used, there are different options available to you for this. If you encoded your videos into Windows Media Video (wmv) format, you can use either Windows Media Player 11 or Microsoft Zune software to share your videos. If you did the MPEG-4 Part 2 or H.264 codec, you'll need to use the Zune package. I put all of my video files under the same root directory. I then setup my Zune software to watch that root directory and add the files to the Zune library. In the Zune settings you can then set it up to share with your Xbox 360 on the network.

That should be it. Now you can go to your Xbox 360 and browse your videos, music, or pictures that are in your Zune library. Some additional instructions can be found here.