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Watching dvd's from a computer

Brian

Eating fat, staying slim
This is not actually an audio question but this seems the best place to make the post.

My music CDs are in a bookcase in the under-stairs cupboard, the music is all stored on a computer hard drive and I listen to music streamed from a laptop through a router to a Squeezebox then into the hifi.

We (my family) have dozens of DVDs cluttering up the place and I would like to do similar with video, ie transfer the lot to a hard disk and use that as the source for watching films.

What do I need to do this?
 
I am using a media streamer, a WDTV Live for both music and the occasional movie (stored on a separate drive). I have the 2TB music drive (with 1.7TB of FLAC) plugged straight in and I attach the other smaller 80GB drive for movies, works well.

I have an optical S/PDIF output from the streamer into my BDAC and then to the amp.
 
Thanks, that looks interesting.

So where I use EAC or dbPowerAmp for extracting music from a CD and converting to whatever format of choice, what is the recommended software for getting my films off the physical DVD and onto this storage device ready for playback on my TV?

Ta
 
What do I need to do this?

A lot of time and a lot of disk space :)

I spent ages on this trying to work out the best way to rip and store DVDs and convert them for streaming on my Humax STB.

The solution I hit upon was to rip to ISO files using DVD Decrypter (free) then convert to AVI - the only format I could reliably get to work with the Humax - using a (non-free) Video converter. I forget the name of the software, but there are many around. Something like the WDTV would work with a lot more different formats, I suspect.

The ripping and converting takes a long time and takes up a lot of hard disk space. I find I'm listening to streamed music a lot more than watching streamed video, so gave up on the idea of converting my entire DVD Collection.
 
I find ripping DVDs an absolute pain. The format never seems right and it takes ages. I have used many rippers that convert to avi files but if the DVD contains any subtitled bits these do not seem to get onto the avi file. Is this always the case in people's experiences?

Simon
 
Format (as in aspect ratio) is my personal nightmare!
I suspect the issue with subtitles is they are coded & not in picture, so your dvd player decodes & displays the subtitles 'live' when playing.
Sorry, I don't know how to solve this.
 
File conversion, and in particular compression is a total ballache and is best kept as simple as possible, by making sure you have playback equipment that will accept as many formats as you can throw at it.

I have a Mac Mini plugged into my TV running Plex which is a fantastic piece of software and will play pretty much anything at any resolution in any format and picture quality is excellent. I've actually mothballed my BluRay player as I've just ripped my BluRay discs (no additional compression) and stored them on an external 1TB hard disc. The picture quality playing these files from the Mac Mini is better than it is from the BluRay player. The only drawback is that I only get standard DolbyDigital/DTS, rather than full blown TrueHD or MasterAudio sound tracks.

For DVD ripping I use Mac The Ripper to get the VOB files from the DVD to the hard drive, then I use a program called MakeMKV which takes all of the VOB files and puts them all into one neat MKV file meaning you can specify taking out all of the extras, menus, subtitles and languages (or keep them in if you want) and just have the movie in exactly the same size, quality and aspect ratio, with the same audio quality that it had on the DVD. It also saves you a good few hours in trans-coding to another format to save a bit of space.
 
The ripping and converting takes a long time and takes up a lot of hard disk space. I find I'm listening to streamed music a lot more than watching streamed video, so gave up on the idea of converting my entire DVD Collection.

This is so true. I started but soon stopped. I listen to a variety of music frequently so having that available on the network makes sense... Films it doesnt... How frequently do you watch a given film? For the films I ended up putting them in a 300 disc folder and keeping that easily available in the louge.. Clear shelves, all nicely sorted so easy to find what I am after.... Job done.

:)
 
File conversion, and in particular compression is a total ballache and is best kept as simple as possible, by making sure you have playback equipment that will accept as many formats as you can throw at it.

I have a Mac Mini plugged into my TV running Plex which is a fantastic piece of software and will play pretty much anything at any resolution in any format and picture quality is excellent. I've actually mothballed my BluRay player as I've just ripped my BluRay discs (no additional compression) and stored them on an external 1TB hard disc. The picture quality playing these files from the Mac Mini is better than it is from the BluRay player. The only drawback is that I only get standard DolbyDigital/DTS, rather than full blown TrueHD or MasterAudio sound tracks.

For DVD ripping I use Mac The Ripper to get the VOB files from the DVD to the hard drive, then I use a program called MakeMKV which takes all of the VOB files and puts them all into one neat MKV file meaning you can specify taking out all of the extras, menus, subtitles and languages (or keep them in if you want) and just have the movie in exactly the same size, quality and aspect ratio, with the same audio quality that it had on the DVD. It also saves you a good few hours in trans-coding to another format to save a bit of space.

Thank you.
That appears to be exactly the answer I was looking for.
The WDTV Live can play most formats I have thrown at it so I shall give it a try.

Simon
 
If you won the DVDs, may as well pirate them for the easy way.

Otherwise use default dvd ripper of your choice. The resultant file will either be a VideoTS folder or a compressed single file, such as AVI, or MKV.

Name either the folder or the file the name of the film followed by the year in brackets and put where ever you want to store films (And only films)

Install XBMC.
Point it at your films folder and it will scan and deliver back scraped results in a gorgeous form. Click on what film you want to watch and off you go.

This supposes you have some form of computer connected to your home TV/Theatre.

The main thing is storage space, a single movie depending on compression for standard def anywhere up to 4.6gigs a piece.
 


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