DVD rom critical to quality? What else?

[Jibaku~Chuusei]

I have a birthday coming up and I think I might be getting a DVD burner. Currently I have a CD rom drive and an empty slot below where the burner would go. The reason for the burner is because the majority of my hard drive space has been consumed by the anime I've downloaded and I'm desperate to free up the drives. I can use the CD burner, of course, but each cd only holds a pidley 3 or so episodes and it would take me hundreds of cd's and an unthinkable amount of time to save it all that way.

One of the primary reasons that I'd like to make room on my drives is that I've wanted to try my hand at making an amv for years and have a number of ideas that have been bouncing around my head without outlet for too long.

ErMaC and AD's guide has me concerned, though. The DVD-ripping section appears to assume that I have a DVD rom, and the Analogue Capture Guide assumes I'm ripping from VHS or LD. I'm getting the impression that, ideally, I should be installing a DVD rom where the burner is likely to go. But without the burner to save stuff off in bulk, my space is nil.

So is a DVD rom fairly critical to get the best possible quality footage? If so I'll probably have to wait until I can afford to replace my CD rom with a CD/DVD combo.

While we're on the subject I'd appreciate any advice on what other upgrades I should aim for as money allows. Currently I have:

AMD Athlon(tm) Processor
1.04 GHz
512MB Ram

And my largest harddrive is just over 52GB.

I realize that I should probably double the RAM, but what else? I don't have money to spare but I want to know what to shoot for and do as much as I can in the meantime.

Thanks for your input.

[Jnzk]

DVD burners can read and write both DVDs and CDs. I myself use an LG DVD writer as my only drive.

If I were you, after the burner I would first invest in a bigger hard disk. DVD rips take a lot of space. You will also need to do lossless renders, intermediate AVI files for editing etc etc. So that's what I would first look into. The bigger the better of course.

[Kai Stromler]

While we're on the subject I'd appreciate any advice on what other upgrades I should aim for as money allows. Currently I have:

AMD Athlon(tm) Processor
1.04 GHz
512MB Ram

And my largest harddrive is just over 52GB.

I realize that I should probably double the RAM, but what else? I don't have money to spare but I want to know what to shoot for and do as much as I can in the meantime.

I'm currently writing a guide to building a x86/x86-64 editing station on a budget; unfortunately it's not anywhere near done yet.

Janzki's advice is pretty good, but since you said that your largest harddrive is 52GB, it seems to imply that you've got others. How much total drivespace do you have, and more importantly, how much do you see yourself having free after you burn off the stuff that's currently filling it? If you can get 50-60GB free, you'll probably want to buff the memory before getting a bigger disk.

--K

[RichLather]

Start looking at much larger hard drives. After living with a single 80GB drive for over a year, I've finally gotten a 200GB secondary drive that I keep all my media in, and I have to say it's been a godsend to have that much free space open for use.

I have all of Cowboy Bebop sitting there now, ripped from my DVDs, and the VOBs plus the MJPEG work files take up over 75GB.

[Jibaku~Chuusei]

How much total drivespace do you have, and more importantly, how much do you see yourself having free after you burn off the stuff that's currently filling it?

C: 4.87BG
D: 52.3GB
E: 38.2GB

So roughly 94GB altogether. Once I burn the anime off of E: it should be clear and I can free up about 30GB on D:. Still probably not near enough for this purpose, though, it's sounding like.

So bigger hard drive, double the ram. Anything else?

If the DVD burner will run CDs as well then I'll just have to replace the CD rom drive with a DVD rom at some point. That's better than ripping DVD footage onto my comp from a DVD player, correct?