All those out there in the know, please respond with your feedbacks, hints and suggestions.

 

Scenario: Sitting in bed, with a tablet (most likely either a iPad2/3 or HP TouchPad), reading a few tech docs etc then decide i'd like to watch a moofy. Wife doesn't want a TV in the bedroom, so decide to stream moofies from my HTS (home theatre server). Also for travelling, i'd ideally be storing a couple of moofies or tv series eps on the tab too.

 

Problem: I have the HTS-o-AWESOME, dont yet have the tab, but am looking into ripping my dvd's onto the HTS now as it'll take me a long time to get them all down. I haven't ripped DVDs before as i've never had a need nor want to do so.

 

Question: What would you recommend program wise and/or format wise for a library of DVDs on the HTS to be both ripped/stored/sorted/streamed giving the best image quality? Size of files to me doesn't bother me as i can always get more HDDs, i'm more interested in the quality aspect than anything.

 

Fire your advices away (o:

I use DVDFab to rip the DVD to my PC and then HDConvertToX to encode movie as x264 in MKV (generally around 1.5-2.0GB per rip). You can set your own options re sound (mux to Stereo, retain 5.1, etc) and video quality (a few simple settings). Once you have found settings you like, away you go. You can even batch a few movies to encode overnight.

 

That said, HDConvertToX can be a bit intimidating at first, but google it and you will find several helpful guides.

Cheers for that.

What are the specs on your HTPC?

 

Best one i have found for ripping things n stuff is HANDBRAKE

AMD AthlonX2 5000+

GA-MA785GM-US2H (iirc)

4Gb RAM

1 x 500Gb HDD (OS etc)

2 x 1TB Samsung drives (storage)

 

Its nothing flash, but it functions mostly as my 'test server' and GDA(general data whore) at the moment. Once i've finished with the 'test server' role, it will be focused solely on the GDA role storing all our music, dvds, other files and running a couple of game servers for some lan action when my mates come over. My main aim is to eventually have this thing running as a media\game server with the option to stream dvd's to the main tv\tab down the track. Its all hooked up via my gigabit switch through to the wifi router.

 

Granted its prolly not the best thing to use for either of those roles but its what i had lying around and doesn't require war office financing (o;

Avs Video converter, very handy...

pretty wide range of presets and codecs etc

Edited August 16, 201114 yr by duanegordon78

Try out handbrake..free from all good locations

 

If you have lotsnlots of DVDs to rip, it might be worth getting a sandybridge cpu..these things have the extra goodness to speed up the processes..

Cheers for that.

 

[edit] - i have my HORSUM rig which is running a Phenom so I'll prolly use that to rip the dvds and just have the HTS-o-AWESOME as the dump path\streamer for the files.

What are the specs on your HTPC?

 

Best one i have found for ripping things n stuff is HANDBRAKE

 

Handbrake can rip? I use it to convert files for youtube upload. didn't know it could rip.

I am running a few servers at home, small business server (for emails mostly) and am running VMware and Hyper-V, one of the servers I am going to setup with PS3 Media Server MLX to do a similar thing, should work well.

I will post up how it goes.

Handbrake can rip? I use it to convert files for youtube upload. didn't know it could rip.

 

 

clickity click

 

http://lifehacker.com/5773000/how-to-rip-dvds-with-handbrake

clickity click

 

http://lifehacker.com/5773000/how-to-rip-dvds-with-handbrake

 

hmmm, are you using it on a Mac or PC? read the article and it appears to deal with the Mac version.

 

if you're using it on PC, how did you get it to rip? i'm looking through the FAQs on the Handbrake site and it says the Windows version isn't a ripper /o:

well managed to get it to rip on my Macbook, have to run VLC player in the background (had that happening last time tho so not sure why it didn't work then...). Anywho, this time i tried launching the DVD in VLC first to make sure it loads, kicked off Handbrake and apart from taking an age to run (hardware i know...) it is now happily ripping my DVDs to iPad/iPhone format (just missed out on the TouchPad firesale on Monday /o:< ) and best of all they work on the iPhone. Now to save my monies for a tab so i can enjoy them on the move (o:

 

[edit] - Blackhawk Down and Rambo First Blood: Pt 2 both work. Looks like launching the DVD in VLC first then ripping is the way to go...

Edited August 25, 201114 yr by Heat-seeker