Media Servers and ISOs

Hi Martin

I had two 2TB mirrored disks that house my DVDs. I playback via two Netgear EVA streamers.

I had a demo of the Kaleidescape system at home. Streaming DVD and BluRay. It is awesome if ease of use and quality are major factors.

Cheers

Graham

Hi Graham / Tog,

Thx for the suggestions.

M

M,

My two cents: if you decide to rip 'm all, I suggest to first use a program like Mac DVD Ripper Pro (MDRP) to strip DRM and copy the disc to hard drive. From there, you can convert into MP4 with handbrake if you wish. MDRP, Ripit and similar programs have two advantages: no transcoding, i.e. absolutely no loss in quality, and preservation of the menu structure if you wish (handy for subtitling, different audio tracks etc and simply to archive and throw nothing away). Plus, as good as Handbrake is, I've found it renders much more smoothly if it doesn't have to cope with copy protection.

I don't see much point in ripping blu-ray at this stage. Good quality rips would end up between 25 and 50 GB each, meaning 20 films on a 1 Gig drive.

EJ

Tog,

That's still lossy compression of an MP2 original into MKV or MP4. Even considering a more efficient codec, some or a lot of audio and visual information is lost by the transcoding - possibly including the PCM master audio track. 

Cheers,

EJ

EJS / Tog,

My practice is always to grab content at the highest possible quality, as I only want to to the exercise once! Hence my thinking of grabbing ISOs, but I do like the sound of removing the crypto.

When I ripped a few DVDs a year or so ago, using HB, I ripped at various qualities using various codecs A) to understand what could be rendered by my Sony BR, and B) to get a feel for the quality / space trade off, for when I later ripped movies for an Asus Eeee, when I traveled.

In much the same way as I have a couple of scripts to create MP3s from my main music library I would aim to do something similar for the grabbed films, if req.

As I have a ridiculous number of DVDs the more automatic I can make the ripping process the better.

EJS, I take your point about BRs. As I still only have about 20 of these I may well just put these into folders for the forseeable future.

Graham, I was impressed by your movie streaming solution - and am doing some digging WRT to the Netgear hardware.

My current thoughts on storage are that as the eldest has now gone to Uni I have reclaimed the desktop PC I set up for her, I'll use this as the movie storage, retaining a separate PC as the NAS for my music.

I believe the Oppo may stream movies, I know the Sony will, although I will probably need to transcode them.

I'll use a spare old laptop to do a few experiments over the next few weeks.

Thx,

M

Erm - I use AnyDVDHD / CloneDVD to extract the main movie (removing any foreign language audio tracks and non-English subtitles) from a DVD and store them as a single ISO image.

I use AnyDVDHD to rip BluRays to an ISO image.

I then use a generic media player to replay them from my Windows Home Server which - last time I looked - was somewhere around 24Tb...

Cheers

Phil

24 TB!!! Phil you should get out more

EJ

Thx Phil,

How many films is that?

M

'A Glorious Sufficiency'

Phil

Hey, I have two backup servers that each hold a copy of that main server too!

Takes over a month to do an initial backup.

Phil

Or "Plex"...