How did you up the resolution of standard DVD movies to 1080P. How did you do BluRay movies. I have a huge collection now of BluRay movies. Maybe my video editor can import BluRay movies. I doubt if they're protected I could do that though.
I like your idea. Since I make videos that can play on a desktop DVD player from all the festival music I shoot. I just bring in all the VOB's that make up a movie set them up on the timeline and than save them off into one large mp4 HD format. It is a lot of work but having all the mp4s on an external hard disk to attach and play on my SP3 would be sweet. I could even make a menu to select the movies. The only thing I disagree with you on is using an SSD for this project. SSD's cost so much more than a 2 terabyte Passport I don't & they play fine without dropping frames using a passport.
I think we should start a thread on the best ways to store and use the precious amount of storage we get with our SP3s. Maybe include best ways to prepare for a disaster - what to backup and how to do a recovery. Or maybe backup and recovery should be another thread.
I only buy blu-ray movies, I don't think upscaling dvd to 1080p is good enough. I'm using the freeware from bluraycopys.com to backup blu-rays to harddrive as "blu-ray folder", but there are many alternatives. usually the freeware takes 30 minutes to backup one blu-ray disc, the paid version should be faster but I've never tried. then you can use handbrake to encode it into mp4. I think mkv can actually directly encode from blu-ray disc into mkv file, though I prefer mp4 format for better compatibility. after encoding, there are some tag editors you can use to add thumbnail and other information, some tools (like windows metro app "mymeta") can directly pull those data from imdb or other movie database and embed into the mp4 file.
I stopped using spinning hard drives since I accidentally dropped and damaged 3 of them in the past 2 years and lost all the data. I'm using a 500gb samsung 840 evo, about $2xx dollars after some
amazon gift cards I earned by using bing search. and may upgrade to a 1tb when price drop to $200 range. ssd is perfect for movie collection because most of time you only "read" from it.