im in the process of setting up a server to share all my music and videos across my lan.

im looking for a good server distro which comes with dvd and mp3 ripping tools that could be setup so when a disc is inserted it automaticly rips it.

any ideas anyone?

Any Linux distribution has the utilities to make MP3 and share them. There is cdparanoia or cdda2wav to rip to WAV, mp3enc or LAME to encode the WAV files to MP3, and there is grip that can help you rip the tracks from the CD. Samba could be used to share the files to Mac and Windows users.

MP3 sounds like crap. OGG and Flac sounds better.

not sure about ripping DVDs...i wish i knew how.. but ripping mp3's are exremely easy..

install 'abcde' it's dependancies should all be resolved... but you will need lame and id3v2... the three packages are standard on almost any distro... once you have them installed, it's as simple as slapping a CD in the drive... opening a terminal.. and:

abcde -o mp3 (you can also to ogg, flac, wav, or whatever)

it also shows you all the CDDB data and gives you the opportunity to change it if you'd like.. or add the info, if the disc is not in the CDDB database... I fell in love with abcde the first time I used it... it's so easy. Sorry i don't know more about ripping DVDs..

For DVD ripping, you can use either vobcopy, transcode, mplayer, k9copy. vobcopy makes a mirror copy of any title on the DVD disc or can make a mirror copy of the disc and this includes the menus. transcode and mplayer contains encoders to re-encode the content into an avi or mov file. k9copy is like DVD Shrink, that literally shrinks the size of the whole entire DVD so it can fit on a DVD-5 (4.7 GB) disc.