There are probably better forums to ask this on but with the wealth of knowledge here someone might know!

A pending flat move next month means the prospect of boxing up 500 DVD's and transporting them to the new place.

I was thinking that to save hassle/space, and with the price of HD's falling so far, it would make sense to get build a media centre pc, rip all my DVD's to hard disk and stream them from there via my xbox 360

Biggest query i guess is - is it actually legal?

i know the law was changed a couple of years back to accomdate ripping music CD's to MP3's; and i think there is a law somewhere that says its ok to back up stuff you own (and i'm not planning on distributing the copies; although i'd probably move the cd's on once ripped)

Any advice gratefully received:thumbup:

AFAIK there is no "right to make your own copy" or "fair use" law in the UK, however it's a law which has never yet been enforced as to do so would make 99% of iPod owners criminals overnight. If you aren't going to sell/distribute copies then don't worry about it.

According to the letter of the law , you aren't entitled to copy your own physical media onto a different format , so what you propose is technically copyright infringement and you could be sued by the film studios.....

In practice that's completely out of the question.

It's probably not worth bothering with though , as it will take you twenty minutes to put the DVDs in a few cardboard boxes , compared to days of work to rip them all onto a hard drive and you'll still have to pack them up anyway unless you plan on leaving them for the new householders