Home theatre PC questions

[legrandefromage]

Right, I would like to build a PC with whatever I can get from the recycling centre to store my DVDs to.

That way instead of 100's of bloody DVDs hanging around, I can just power up the pc and search & play.

the screen is an older pre HD 42" plasma with component in and SVGA (or whatever 42" would be to a PC)

I have lots of SATA drives , a nice case etc

What do I need to do next?

ta.

 

[perry]

Sounds like you have the makings of a media server .

http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2007/06/05 ... n_server/1

 

[hamster]

There are software apps like DVD cloner to do this. I would suggest building up the PC as a NAS with the HDDs in it and then using a media extender (PS3, Hisense box etc).

The video performance of most PCs is so awful it's better to get a dedicated CE extender device - most PCs really struggle with the workload of lots of MPEG decoding unless they are doing nothing else. Plus you get fan noise etc.

There again I'm a bit of a video nerd so probably not the best to ask!

 

[legrandefromage]

basically, I just want the video equivalent of iTunes so I can load up DVDs and watch them later

 

[hamster]

The problem is the copy protection on DVDs so you can't do this directly. You need dodgy software... Hollywood attacked and closed several companies who were making media server things that did it.
Handbrake and other transcoders just refuse to play ball when you feed them a DVD.

DivX might be worth a look...

 

[legrandefromage]

poo....

 

[Neil]

basically, I just want the video equivalent of iTunes so I can load up DVDs and watch them later

Run it as Media Center (Windows) or you can run XBMC on a PC (under windows).

 

[legrandefromage]

basically, I just want the video equivalent of iTunes so I can load up DVDs and watch them later

Run it as Media Center (Windows) or you can run XBMC on a PC (under windows).

xbmc looks quite good, it played a dvd with no extra plugins but crashed when i hit 'stop'...

 

[REKIBorter]

You need Clone DVD and something like AnyDVD both available here http://www.slysoft.com/en/

They do free trials for you to get a taster but better than any freeware / adware. Lifetime subscription and regular updates.

 

[Neil]

You need Clone DVD and something like AnyDVD both available here http://www.slysoft.com/en/

They do free trials for you to get a taster but better than any freeware / adware. Lifetime subscription and regular updates.

Not really any better than something like DVD Fab HD Decrypter (freeware, with regular - and I mean regular - updates).

I've done plenty of stuff with DVD video - ripping / extracting, editing, authoring. The only package I've ever paid for (and still don't regret) is an mpeg2 frame accurate, and smart-encoding editor.

For practically anything you can thing of doing with DVD video, there's really good freeware available - DVD rebuilder (in case you want to "backup" to DVD5), HC encoder (a truly excellent freeware mpeg2 encoder), pgcedit, ifoedit, muxman, vob2mpg, that-which-shall-not-be-named, DVDshrink (if the shrink ain't to sizable), rejig, imgburn, GUIforDVDauthor, vobblanker and let's not forget VLC media player.

Other favourites of mine are The FilmMachine (my favourite AVI->DVD), AutoGK (for t'other way around), xvid4psp, avidemux, and the evergreen virtualdub.

So much good freeware for this sort of thing.