XBMC/Apple TV for ripped DVDs

That WD Live gadget looks interesting, and it is cheap!

How's the UI?
 
Four Suns said:
Also, I don't understand the whole video output and scaling. If I put a standard DVD into a BluRay player, it does something called "1080p upconvert" or something and it looks really good. Can these players do that? (I know it's not true HD but there is some "magic" that happens to make it better)
Click to expand...

Good upconverting is HARD. The best currently on the market for consumer products is, as far as I know, Faroudja DCDi. Good stuff. Use to be really expensive. You're not going to find an upconverting computer that has it and I don't think that Apple TV does either. It's pretty processor intensive, needs to be in the digital stream before MPEG 2 (for DVD) decoding.

Best regards,
Frank
 
Just a question concerning ripping DVD's and keeping the original quality.... why bother if you're using it on the boat? Unless you're using a big ass TV on the boat, I don't think you're going to notice a much of a difference if you compress the DVD down during the rip process. Why not shrink it down and save some space?

My recommendation, although from the PC world would be to run a program called AnyDVD. AnyDVD runs in the background and strips copyright info so DVD's can be ripped in the first place. Run that in parallels on your MAC. Then either run CloneDVD or DVD Shrink to rip down the DVD into an iso.

Doug
 
douglee25 said:
Just a question concerning ripping DVD's and keeping the original quality.... why bother if you're using it on the boat? Unless you're using a big ass TV on the boat, I don't think you're going to notice a much of a difference if you compress the DVD down during the rip process. Why not shrink it down and save some space?

My recommendation, although from the PC world would be to run a program called AnyDVD. AnyDVD runs in the background and strips copyright info so DVD's can be ripped in the first place. Run that in parallels on your MAC. Then either run CloneDVD or DVD Shrink to rip down the DVD into an iso.

Doug
Click to expand...

There's plenty of native DVD ripping apps for the Mac.

Why would I want to lose resolution? I have HD TV's on the boat.... and that is more resolution than a standard DVD has... Sure don't want to lose any... would like to gain some if I could.
 
I personally just find that the degradation in quality when shrinking a dvd is minimal as compared to the space you will save.

Either way, keep the AnyDVD program in mind if you can't find others to strip the copyright protection. I find that it allows 95% of DVD's to be ripped.

Doug
 
The UI on the WD box is very simple but certainly useable. Here is a link with some screen shots http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1118/5/

Doug brings up a good point. In general MPEG2 (compression used on DVDs) is not very efficient in terms of quality vs file size, so you can make dramatic reductions in the file size, with only a moderate loss of quality by using one of the newer compression codecs like Divx or H.264. This does not necessarily mean throwing away any resolution (most encoders will give you the choice to maintain the original pixel count), but since you are compressing previously compressed video, you are degrading the picture. How much compression can be tolerated boils down to a few factors.... Are you going to watch it on a portable 3" screen or a 50" HD TV? Will you be 2' or 20' from the display? How good is the scaler in your television/player?

Gary seemed to have his mind made up that he wanted to maintain 100% quality so I didn't bother going down this road with him.

Frank, Faroudja has been around a long time, and their DCDi stuff is good, but some newer players like Anchor Bay (VRS) & Silicon Optix (HQV Realta) are really doing some outstanding work in the consumer electronics field. I believe the AppleTV uses a Nvidia graphics card, and while its not one of the high end scalers above, it does a pretty decent job....I'll even go so far as to say its got the best looking computer to television standard output that I've seen.
 
Four Suns said:
There's plenty of native DVD ripping apps for the Mac.

Why would I want to lose resolution? I have HD TV's on the boat.... and that is more resolution than a standard DVD has... Sure don't want to lose any... would like to gain some if I could.
Click to expand...

You're correct, ripping the DVD is the easy part and 480p is the best you will get from a standard DVD. However, to my knowledge there is no way to up-convert/up-scale the digital copy during or after rip. Up-scaling can only be done by the hardware so your best bet is to just rip the DVD to a lossless format and find hardware to up-scale. Worst case is you will watch DVD quality on you HD TV.

I watch my ripped movies on my HD TV at home and they look just like watching a standard DVD on an HD TV.....not Blu Ray quality but it still looks great.
.
 
I just came accross this recent article (Jan 2010) on how to rip DVD's and Blu Ray. Thought you might find it helpful, (I did). I now understand why HandBrake wasn't working on my DVD's, but it worked fine on the ISO file that my friend lent to me for testing. The output from Handbrake was scrambled when the source was my DVD.

Before using Handbrake, I need to rip the DVD to an ISO file and break the encrption. I thought Handbrake would take care of the encryption, but it doesn't

http://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/how-to-rip-a-dvd-or-blu-ray-movie/
 
OK... so I think I've made a little progress in ripping DVD's... I figured out that Plex can actually read in the image file from RipIt. If I do a "Get Info" on the actual DVD I get around 7-8 GB and the file that is ripped is the exact same size. I guess, as stated earlier, it's an exact image.

My next question is the sound issue. I assume if I rip a DVD that I still have Dolby/5.1 surround sound available? The Mac Mini has a dual use 1/8" mini jack that supports either a standard 1/8" stereo headphone plug or a 1/8" Toslink optical plug. Apparently, MacDVD supports 5.1 surround sound but not iTunes... I'm not sure about Plex. I need to have 5.1 surround sound supported on the boat.
 
Vince_nj1 said:
I just came accross this recent article (Jan 2010) on how to rip DVD's and Blu Ray. Thought you might find it helpful, (I did). I now understand why HandBrake wasn't working on my DVD's, but it worked fine on the ISO file that my friend lent to me for testing. The output from Handbrake was scrambled when the source was my DVD.

Before using Handbrake, I need to rip the DVD to an ISO file and break the encrption. I thought Handbrake would take care of the encryption, but it doesn't

http://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/how-to-rip-a-dvd-or-blu-ray-movie/
Click to expand...

Great link on the article. It's hard to find and understand all the "secret handshakes" this industry has.

I went and bought this product:

http://www.xilivideo.com/dvd-ripper-ultimate.html

I played with handbrake and am still playing with RipIt but this xilivideo product seems to get through the encryption and can dump out to different formats simultaneously... So I can make an image as well as other formats at the same time. It was $55.00...
 
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I tunes will do surround sound, just won't output it through the optical output because it goes through quicktime. BUT, it you hook something like this up, it will play 5.1

thumb
 
The AVAtrix requires an optical or coax link to feed the surround sound source audio to the distributed surround sound systems on board...
 
That Archos tablet looks like a cool little gadget. One thing they left off is being able to use it as a remote control. Be a nice way to control all of the devices. That level of control is one thing which has kept me away from doing this - It has to be simple enough for the family to control and use or they'll just ignore it. The Harmony remotes have made it possible for mainstream devices - but I haven't tried to control a media PC with one yet.
 
tdappleman said:
It has to be simple enough for the family to control and use or they'll just ignore it. The Harmony remotes have made it possible for mainstream devices - but I haven't tried to control a media PC with one yet.
Click to expand...

That is so true... That's why I'm not a fan of the hacks to the AppleTV. You end up having to go to multiple areas to find a movie... not going to happen. All the movies need to be under "Movies".

I know for the Mac, these software solutions use the Apple Remote. The harmony ones work... and I have an RTI remote which allows things to be more "customized" for the system and makes them a little simpler for the end user.
 
OK... I've messed around enough and I think the Mac Mini running Plex is the way to go. I've put about 2 dozen DVDs on it and it's pretty slick. It also ties into my iTunes (60 GB of music) and iPhoto very well.... I showed the wife the interface and she liked it... it's simple... although setting it all up is not....

With two 1.5 TB drives on it, I can store over 300 DVDs on the thing... pretty sweet.

Plex (which is an offshoot of XBMC) also ties nicely into a bunch of streaming apps. There is one for the Food Network, The Daily Show, Hulu, Fox News and a few others. If you have Internet connectivity, it's pretty sweet.

Thanks for the insight on how some of this stuff works.
 
G, what version of the Mac Mini are you going to use (processor / OS version)?
 
I have a mac mini I run all my business accounting software on now... It's a 2 year old machine running 10.5 and I have not had 1 issue with the thing... I don't think it's been turned off or rebooted in the 2 years I've had it.

I'm going to pick up a new mac mini for this so it'll be a Snow Leopard system. I'll just get the low-end $599 system since I'm going to stick some big disks on it. I'm going to put a mirror of this on the boat and in the house and hook through both AV distribution systems. Clear up a lot of drawer space and clutter...
 
That's why I asked - I have a two year old Mini as well, and I don't think the OS can handle Plex...

One last thought - I've seen Apple TVs on eBay that have XBMC installed on them. Any idea how that works - does XBMC disable the AppleTV UI?
 
From what I can tell, XBMC is "instead of" the AppleTV UI. The problem I saw with XBMC on the Mac is it didn't tie in as cleanly to the iTunes/iPhoto world... Plex is XBMC with all the Mac-specific plugins. I also think the Plex UI is a little nicer...

I may put a small printer on the boat and stick it where all the damn DVDs used to be. There has been many times I wish I had a printer on the boat. I can then leverage the Mac Mini to be a print server as well as a router for the rest of the boat network... and take that function off the bridge PC.
 
So... I've been playing with this Mac Mini I bought for a boat movie system... I've got about 100 DVD's in the thing which is three file-storage-sized boxes of DVD cases. I have about 100 to go (my son is ripping them for me). I've cleared 2 drawers and several cabinets of DVDs off the boat...

The hardware for this thing ended up being a Mac Mini and 2 external 1.5TB drives by Newertech:

http://www.newertech.com/products/ministackv3.php

I set them up in a Raid 1 (mirror) configuration so I only have 1.5TB of external disk space logically. That way if one drive fails, I won't lose all the movies (and all the work to get them there). This is the hardware setup:

DSC_0201.jpg


I think it looks pretty good and is very small...

So I've settled on using XBMC. Plex turned out to be pretty buggy and would just quit when watching a movie. I've played around with some of the newer skins and customized one and removed a bunch of crap to make the interface pretty simple...

The performance on this thing is pretty good. For about 100 DVD's, I'm averaging about 6GB per DVD. I've set up the "Movies" directory that contains all the ripped DVD's and I have had 3 different movies being streamed to 3 different TV's/computers in the house and it works great. It takes about 6mbs (megabits per sec) to stream a DVD over the network... With the Mac Mini plugged into a 100 mbs wired ethernet network, it didn't have any performance issues.

This is definitely a space saver and makes watching movies much much easier... Total cost on this is about $1000... So off the boat comes the AppleTV and this will replace it... so I get to do more cabinet work.

Just an FYI.
 
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