I have read the forums and been to the Wiki and I am still confused. (I apologize for that.) What I am wondering is, is KnoppMyth what I am after. What I am after is basically a Box to store all my DVDs in and call them up when Iw ant to watch them. DVR or live TV is a peripheral desire at the moment and not what I am really interested in (ATM). I was a system to rip/store/catalog/search my collection, and then play it on demand. I would not want to waste money (or anyone heres time) so I figured Id ask straight out. Thanks

There is the facility to rip dvd's to your hard drive. Needs a bit of tinkering to do so (ie looking for something to run in 'examples') but perfectly possible.

In short yes.

KM can import non encrypted DVDs and save them as files. MythTV uses a MySQL database to keep info/descriptions about the imported files, such as descriptions, posters, and genre. KM is very flexible with storage if you need 1TB of storage isn't too hard to setup or add storage. Search function isn't that great, but with intellegent folder structure can achieve those goals.

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/MythVideo

Pics

http://mythtv.sf.net/mc/mythvideo1.png
http://mythtv.sf.net/mc/mythvideo2.png
http://mythtv.sf.net/mc/mythvideo3.png
http://mythtv.sf.net/mc/mythvideo4.png


Here is a link to a KM box I built that is tunerless kinda along the same purpose.

Another similar commerical solution is
http://www.kaleidescape.com/products

but you are going to pay though the nose and not as flexible.

If you have an old PC around I hight suggest giving KnoppMyth a try.

Thank you for the information.
spalVl, Kalidescape is exactly what I want. I saw it demoed at a home show and I was like, 'Yup thats what I need' But at 25K + for the main system then another 3-4K for the remotes sytem, my enthusiasm for that product diminished. I figured it was nothing more than a datbase driven file server. Should be easy enough to build hardware wise, but it would be the software that will be the crux.
Again thanks for the incentives I shall give this a try.

Wholly properiatry rip off Batman... I knew it was expensive didn't know was E X P E N S I V E

I will have to remind my fiance how much money I am saving us everytime she complains about "wasting time playing" with the media centre.

KM is totallly capable of reading and writing to backend storage as well, is not hard to setup a server with hardware RAID5, or NAS, or SAN. Then configure KM to use NFS or samba to import to and retrieve media from that shared storage area. For just a few grand for hardware/storage, some OpenSource server for storage (SME server, FreeNAS), and KnoppMyth frontend(s) you can create a very comparable solution.