I bitstream mine to an amp for playback so I get TrueHD and Master Audio DTS.
Movie Ripping and Playback
- Thread starter Stonehead
- Start date
I bitstream mine to an amp for playback so I get TrueHD and Master Audio DTS.
tmbrown97
Senior Member
I have a pretty large number of ISO's created from movies, and I have Sage, albeit largely unimplemented... My problem was that to use Sage it seemed I had to extract the files out of the ISO into file folders. Has anyone found a way around this? I'd really rather leave them as ISO's. I'm wishing someone made a program that let ISO's appear as folders to the OS so Sage would see them - but maybe I'm missing something.
pete_c
Guru
The media tank that I am using will playback an ISO with current firmware. (menus and chapters playback). I haven't updated MM receiver yet to one that can play DTS/True HD. I have read that most current firmware will playback DTS. I mostly keep my MPC mostly shut down but have the ability to playback what is on the media tank / storage. Historically i've installed (for testing) on MPC a couple of applications which utilize DB's for detailed searches in addition to utilizing DVD profiler (years now - still a reference for my movies).
At last count with a 1TB drive on media tank I have used 336GB's with approximately 467 DiVx movies. (Movies, TV series, etc) and 268 Gb with 51 Mkv movies (currently my preference is mostly 720's versus 1080's - space). I'm looking at a newer media tank which allows use of a 2.5" SATA drive in a smaller package. I can today mount my mediatank behind HD and it does currently allow playback of internet media / includes a basic browser and allows use of a USB keyboard/mouse (use a wireless one if I do not utilize remote control).
At last count with a 1TB drive on media tank I have used 336GB's with approximately 467 DiVx movies. (Movies, TV series, etc) and 268 Gb with 51 Mkv movies (currently my preference is mostly 720's versus 1080's - space). I'm looking at a newer media tank which allows use of a 2.5" SATA drive in a smaller package. I can today mount my mediatank behind HD and it does currently allow playback of internet media / includes a basic browser and allows use of a USB keyboard/mouse (use a wireless one if I do not utilize remote control).
Format is a serious concern here, especially with Bluray desires.
I was just ripping to native format but my drives were filling up too fast! I eventually had to streamline the process with a video encoding step to bring the sizes down.
The choices of format are silly and everyone has an opinion so I won't go there but I will chime in with everyone else that you DO need to consider it unless you have some crazy solution for storage.
I was just ripping to native format but my drives were filling up too fast! I eventually had to streamline the process with a video encoding step to bring the sizes down.
The choices of format are silly and everyone has an opinion so I won't go there but I will chime in with everyone else that you DO need to consider it unless you have some crazy solution for storage.
Does DVD Decrypter allow for the best quality playback of DVD's or does the program compress the files? Also, does this software allow for all normal DVD control (i.e., FF & RW, Main Menu, selecting scenes, etc?) If not, what software allows this? I am starting to burn DVD's and want to make sure I use the best software.
I was looking into DVD Decrypter because it is free. Is it much better just to go with AnyDVD? Does AnyDVD allow you to do the things I specified above (fast forward, rewind, menu options, etc.)?
Not being able to rewind/forward/skip/use menu is a player 'feature/limitation', not ripping related. I use AnyDVD in the background and use DVDshrink to rip just the main movie, uncompressed, and have never run into any problems on any of the software platforms I have used (MCE, MediaPortal, GeexBox and now SageTV).
pete_c
Guru
- a tangent and a bit "off topic"
Personally if I want the consumer related DVD/BR features then I will just utilize the HW disk player. Putting those features into a raw video file is not worth the effort for me personally. I just really want to watch the movie.
Today if I want to pause a movie at a certain point to see a few days later I use the time when I paused it.
I do not even turn on the HW disk player any more.
A while ago played with MediaPortal and various different DB's which used IMDB for nice search / displays of content.
Its really nice to be able to sort thru cover art / details for the media content; but typically always have in mind what I want to watch and only want to watch the main content. I still own and use DVD profiler and remember actually purchasing a bar code scanner for the purpose of entering data into DVD Profiler years ago.
I don't do this today with my MP3s. Rather more important to me is the content / album / custom composition of said MP3. I guess the same can be said about the movies that I watch. In the CarPC's I see the cover art and the rest of the ID3 tags but more interested in the name of the album / song / artist and year. One feature that I like with the CarPC is resuming the song that I left on when shutting off the vehicle.
Personally if I want the consumer related DVD/BR features then I will just utilize the HW disk player. Putting those features into a raw video file is not worth the effort for me personally. I just really want to watch the movie.
Today if I want to pause a movie at a certain point to see a few days later I use the time when I paused it.
I do not even turn on the HW disk player any more.
A while ago played with MediaPortal and various different DB's which used IMDB for nice search / displays of content.
Its really nice to be able to sort thru cover art / details for the media content; but typically always have in mind what I want to watch and only want to watch the main content. I still own and use DVD profiler and remember actually purchasing a bar code scanner for the purpose of entering data into DVD Profiler years ago.
I don't do this today with my MP3s. Rather more important to me is the content / album / custom composition of said MP3. I guess the same can be said about the movies that I watch. In the CarPC's I see the cover art and the rest of the ID3 tags but more interested in the name of the album / song / artist and year. One feature that I like with the CarPC is resuming the song that I left on when shutting off the vehicle.
KentDub
Active Member
+1. However, that is not entirly true. When authoring DVDs, it is possible to disable buttons on the remote. Thus, then can force you to watch trailers, or disclaimers. During the ripping process - there are usually options to remove these limitations. There are some players (MediaPlayerClassic for example, if instructed) that simply don't honor the blocked commands to begin with. Other than that, I think you're referring to the ability to 'seek' on the timeline -- and yes, that is definatly a player limitation. It can also be caused by transcoding into a different format (Some formats, are 'streaming' formats, that are unindexed). Sticking with the origional DVD format is wise once more because it is also indexed and designed to seek well.
I'm not attacking here, but I think you ment to say "not recompressed" instead of "uncompressed". DVD's are already compressed into MPEG2, and to uncompress them would be so much data that slower PCs wouldn't have a chance in heck to be able to play them.
KentDub
Active Member
Back to the origional subject
I'm doing the same thing here. I have about 800 (yikes!) DVDs on my two NAS systems. I tried to do the whole blu-ray, but ran into major issues. First off, my NAS's wern't quick enough (even with their internal RAIDs) to be able to stream consistantly blu-ray content. I do have 4tb internal on my workstation, so I had to use that (4x1tb in RAID-0) Second, while I am more than happy to donate 8gb/movie for a DVD, 35gb/movie for a blu-ray fills up a 4tb volume really really quick.If you really don't care about quality, then I suppose you can recompress them (which, no matter what anyone tells you, if you change formats - you lose quality). I'm a quality nut and have a view that since I spent big bucks on hifi equipment and damnit I want it in the best quality possible =) So at this point, I'm still putting the disks in my blu-ray player. AFAIK it's more cost effective at this point to get a huge (200+?) blu-ray disk player. Maybe you could rig something up to seamlessly control the player and use the HTPC to still show them in it's browse feature. You are also going to need to make sure you have a solid 1000mbps link between devices you want to stream to. Older fast ethernet devices simply won't have the bandwidth needed for true HD.
Maybe you won't have these issues and I certinaly don't want to stop you from trying, but those are the problems I ran into.
Let us know how it goes.
pete_c
Guru
So I am curious what is the difference between HD on a BR disk and HD "recompressed" to an MKV file? or maybe a
High quality DiVx formated movie with DD versus an Mpeg2 compressed DVD?
Am I getting my HD space worth by assuming all is well with a 4.8Gig 720p HD movie or a 9.6 gig 1080p movie average size (some are 10-15G though) - BBC Planet Earth for example.
The topic of consumer media makes for interesting conversation - remember my first VCR - 1981 - JVC - think it was around 1K back then. It might have had stereo. Renting a movie at the time was about $10 a night but the movies were about $100 each at the time.
High quality DiVx formated movie with DD versus an Mpeg2 compressed DVD?
Am I getting my HD space worth by assuming all is well with a 4.8Gig 720p HD movie or a 9.6 gig 1080p movie average size (some are 10-15G though) - BBC Planet Earth for example.
The topic of consumer media makes for interesting conversation - remember my first VCR - 1981 - JVC - think it was around 1K back then. It might have had stereo. Renting a movie at the time was about $10 a night but the movies were about $100 each at the time.
KentDub
Active Member
A recompressed HD video will still be superior to a standard-def DVD. However, it will be inferior to the original format. All lossy compressions, by definition, are approximations of the original source. So if you recompress a blu-ray, you're making an approximation of an approximation.... The same goes for a "high quality" DivX knockoff of the original MPEG2 DVD - it's an approximation of an approximation.
We can dive into the whole theory of video compression if you're interested. The main thing modern codecs do is temporal compression. Rather than storing the entire frame each frame, it only stores the difference from the last frame. Every so often there is a 'key frame' that is a full frame to make sure everything hasn't gotten too far out (ever seen a video that is 'sliding'/'smearing'?). This is also necessary for the video to be able to seek. On top of that, the video is split into its primary components (akin to how component video works), it's luminance and chrominance (black/white version and the color data).
Human eyes are much, much more sensitive to black/white, so that 'channel' is compressed the least. Since we are not nearly as sensitive to color, those channels takes the biggest hit, and lose the most quality. Some people can't tell the difference - for some, their displays aren’t good enough to show the difference. Others, especially those who crave high-end systems, can see the blocks and other artifacts created by compression; it drives us nuts.
When you recompress a video, the data is first decoded, and turned back into full frames. When the encoder starts, it now has to not only encode the frames, but also encode all the artifacts that the decoder created. When that recompressed video is played, you now have at a minimum of 2x the visual artifacts. Audio never loses quality, and that should be mentioned, the streams are simply copied over.
"Planet Earth" (new "Life" coming soon too!) is absolute perfect example of a video I would never, ever want to recompress. It was videoed and produced using only the highest quality equipment, and it really shows. Try watching "Planet Earth" on a standard-def television and you'll see it isn't nearly as breathtaking.
For me, I'm completely willing to spend up to 8GB/DVD. I also have my entire audio library in a lossless codec (roughly 2x to 3x the size of an mp3). Even though I have over 10TB of storage on my network, I am not at the point that I would copy all of my blu-rays onto the network. Even with disk space very cheap these days, for me, it would require that I purchase a third NAS or build a storage server. This may, however, be an option for some who integrate their media and storage servers, and build it to scale out as they collect more movies. Approximately 30 blu-ray disks per TB means you'll need a lot of drives for a moderately-sized collection.
As with most things, there are pros/cons to this situation. You need to find out what is most important to you, and your budget. If quality comes first, it may not be viable to host your blu-rays on a NAS, but viable on a media/storage combo server. Maybe you want to recompress your blu-rays and put them on your NAS, but actually put the disk in for the Epics (LOTR, SW, Planet Earth, etc.). Maybe you really can't tell the difference and just don't care - and that's fine too.
english_1969
Active Member
I am using DVDFab to rip Blu Rays. It can decrypt and compress to BD25, BD9, etc. and allow for selection of specific tracks of audio and subtitle.
I am currently using My Movies and windows media center on win 7.
I rip to BD9 with TrueHD track (or whatever the best track is).
I am using the Shark007 codecs on win7 to play the .m2ts files natively on WMC.
Right now, the codec outputs 5.1 over my HDMI...still working on how to get TrueHD to output to the surround processor. I have a Zotac ITX MB using the onboard HDMI out, I understand I may have to add an ATI radeon card to get TrueHD.
W
I am currently using My Movies and windows media center on win 7.
I rip to BD9 with TrueHD track (or whatever the best track is).
I am using the Shark007 codecs on win7 to play the .m2ts files natively on WMC.
Right now, the codec outputs 5.1 over my HDMI...still working on how to get TrueHD to output to the surround processor. I have a Zotac ITX MB using the onboard HDMI out, I understand I may have to add an ATI radeon card to get TrueHD.
W
