Issues with playing ripped blue rays from hard drive

Lou,

I have NMTs around the house which I purchased for $50 each and installed 1 TB SATA (whatever was the price du jour) drives in them. They play onboard and NAS Blue Ray rips fine. They also talk to my TVersity / Play On TV box. Recently though just turned on my AOpen Mini PC (core duo and 2 Gb Ram. I've flip flopped with it running W7MCE or XPMCE; shutting it mostly off because I didn't like MCE. It has an HD tuner which works just fine (micro miniature). Recently; maybe a week ago installed XBMC on it and its convinced to use the box again.

Your post has me comparing the Blue Ray rips playback via the NAS from both the cheap $50 NMT and the Aopen mini PC (looks like a MAC mini).

The NMT is about half the height of the AOpen mini PC; smaller depth and width; very small footprint. You can chroot the NMT and do all kinds of stuff with it via Linux.

I see no issues with NAS playback on either machine. The AOpen has a Gb port on it but still utilizing it connected to a 100Mb switch.

That said and what I see above; an internal HW upgrade to your box may be all you need.

TroyMT said:

The ram is a little light for a vista box that is now asked to pump out a 25 gig video file. Is the box running Vista 64bit? If so buy more ram as It is dirt cheap.

Check the hard drive.

You also mentioned VNC player... I assume that was a typo and you meant VLC. What version are you running? They just released 2.0; upgrade to that version and see if that helps.

Lastly the HD3200 is a little light for playing full BR rips. Go with something like AMD/ATI 5450 fanless series or higher (DTS audio support etc) and the card is cheap ($30 - $50). I am using a 2 year old 5450 and can play LOTR full uncompressed rips which are close to 40G per disc without issue.

Click to expand...

Yes, I meant VLC, too many meaningless letter names! Of course i have VNC as well but that is something different. And yes, it is the most recent version of VLC.

It is vista 32.

At a glance, it seems that the only difference between success with an actual br disk and failure with ripped br is the source drive. But I don't want to just start throwing new pieces of hardware at the problem only to in the end buy a whole new computer. It may be that the encoding off of the br drive requires less processing to get a video image than the m2ts file does. ???

OK, so RAM is cheap and I agree it is a light in that department. I will probably go ahead and pick some up. I think I'll also throw another hard drive in there and move the video files to it.

EDIT:
I copied one of the m2ts some files over to my laptop, which has far less processing power and video prowess, and the ripped file plays fine!

pete_c said:

Lou,

I have NMTs around the house which I purchased for $50 each and installed 1 TB SATA (whatever was the price du jour) drives in them. They play onboard and NAS Blue Ray rips fine. They also talk to my TVersity / Play On TV box. Recently though just turned on my AOpen Mini PC (core duo and 2 Gb Ram. I've flip flopped with it running W7MCE or XPMCE; shutting it mostly off because I didn't like MCE. It has an HD tuner which works just fine (micro miniature). Recently; maybe a week ago installed XBMC on it and its convinced to use the box again.

Your post has me comparing the Blue Ray rips playback via the NAS from both the cheap $50 NMT and the Aopen mini PC (looks like a MAC mini).

The NMT is about half the height of the AOpen mini PC; smaller depth and width; very small footprint. You can chroot the NMT and do all kinds of stuff with it via Linux.

I see no issues with NAS playback on either machine. The AOpen has a Gb port on it but still utilizing it connected to a 100Mb switch.

That said and what I see above; an internal HW upgrade to your box may be all you need.

Click to expand...

I may end up doing something like this when its all said and done. But as it is I have already gone to the trouble of running hundreds of feet of hdmi wire all over the house with switches and splitters and the like. I get beautiful image quality on 4 tvs around the house all fed from a central location with rf remotes distributing blue ray player, sattelite, and the computer. Hate the idea of switching to a different concept at this point.

Then I would say the hard drive is the most likely culprit at this point.

More ram isn't going to help you. You already have 4g on a 32 bit OS which is the max (Really only around 3.25ish).

Run the hard drives manufacturers diag utility and see what is up. Maybe you just have a bad sector or something simple.

http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm is a great tool to have in the IT tool chest. I cannot count the times this tool has saved my bacon.

Lou,

I kind of skipped and went from analogue to digital via the use of the network for whatever reason. I have though recently replaced the LCD in the office; now the 3rd one going from a first gen 19" NTSC LCD to a 27" to current 34" LCD. That said I have MM (I call them "subzone" setups in three bedrooms and tapped into the master bedroom MM for HDMI, SVideo and whatever else devices I have there. Initially used Rapid Run cables (few years back). I had a NMT and recently a Logitech connected with "dangling" cables from the TV (mounted near the ceiling) to a wood cabinet at ground level below the LCD. I redid these using one double Keystone wall plate with now 6+6 keystone jacks behind the set and another 6 jack keystone plate at "ground" level in the last couple of weeks. So now related to "broadcast" video the LCD gets OTA, Cable, Satellite and in house video plus the HDMI stuff, Cat5E network and rest of legacy connections (which I will probably remove soon). Locally it's just be the very tiny NMT hanging behind the TV connected to the network via the keystone jack on the wall. That said I really never played too much with streaming HD on the network and preferred a local source. (hard drive in the NMT).

I looked at my cell phone movies / older Blue Ray rips that I did from "years" ago and they are all "core" codecs that I made having purchased the core codecs (matroska) many years ago. Maybe its just my old eyes but I'm fine with the HD definition I see with my MKV files. I learned a lot from vcd help dot com many many years ago. I still though rip DVDs to DiVx formatted with DD 5.1 sound today though.

I quite bringing DVD players etc on plane flights and went to using my cell phone with stereo headsets to watch movies; small picture but easy to carry the entertainment. Only thing was sometimes I would get "yelled" at wondering around the plane listening to my music with the bluetooth stereo headsets.

I do have one "dedicated" to ripping computer on line; its very old now in computer years and works fine still. Its so old that I still have an integrated firewire board / capture device in it for digital camera recording transfer stuff. (ADVC stuff and an editing board - very old stuff). I volunteered in the 1980's to be part of a public access TV "cooking" show and learned all kinds of stuff. Lots of fun.

I did fill up one of the NMT drives and noticed that it started to give me RW issues playing back videos until I started to delete some files. Like one HD 14Gb movie made a difference. The box is Linux and the drive is NTFS formatted.