HTPC Ripped, Streamed DVD System Feasible?

Can anyone offer advice on whether it's feasible to rip my entire dvd collection to my pc, and then by means of a remote, instantly call up and watch any of them on my TV? This is something the wife and I have been interested in for a while now, but even the large dvd changers don't meet my needs. What would be involved in ripping my legal copies to my drive in a format that I can stream? Since I want to use a remote, a set top pc would be required in the mix, correct? I have 100 little questions, and my research so far leads me to think it's possible, but I want to get the opinions of a few of you who are more knowledgeable on the subject.

 

It sounds like you want an extender system. Basically you need a PC somewhere with a hard drive containing your DVDs or access to your DVDs. You then need a smaller system to stream the DVDs from your other computer to the set-top-box one.

An Xbox360 works as a media center extender if you have one.

 

I would buy a NAS box with uPnP server say with a 500GB Hard drive and use a dvd player that can work as a uPnP client. Rip the dvds to the nas box, then your good to go.

 

My XBOX (original) is set up like that, XBMC reads the DVD ISOs straight off and uses those rather then me switching discs.

 

i saw this in my local electronics shop not long ago and i actually brought it...

its a hdd based media player.. which is the size of a external HDD in which you plug in a hdd and it plugs into the tv either through composite/component or d-sub.. you then navigate your way through and select what you want to watch...

for ripping tho.. depends on how many dvd's you have to rip and if you want the dvd extras you get these days... if you have so many that you have to buy multiple hard drives then you might want to consider re-encoding them into avi.. saving space and they will still be watchable but will take a while to do..

 

I think you mean divx Reencoding mpg to avi will mean they take up about 10x more space!

One of the better programs I've found for ripping dvds is DVDShrink - it lets you get rid of all the other language sound files that you'll never need, saving space. It also lets you compress the dvd content to either fit a standard dvd size or a custom percentage.

 

The new Apple TV system seems like it would do what you want...

 

Avi is a container, it was only recently that divx got its own extension. An avi file could be any of many formats i.e divx,huffy, xvid etc.

 

dvd to avi is about 10x less space.... ive encoded a dvd to 700mb instead of the 4gb+ dvd files with the same amount of quality...

 

with or without 5.1 audio ?

 

Uncompressed, straight avi?

 

*does not believe Springs*

.avi is just a container for a start, the codec is what's important. However, the usual suspects of Xvid and DivX generally need a couple of GB's to get an avi to the same sort of quality as you'll see on a DVD. Ok yes, there is the odd movie that's well suited to high compression and when done by a real professional it can look as good as the DVD it comes from, but that's not do-able by your average at home geek and certainly it relies upon movies that favour high compression.

Quality is of course, subjective, but it doesn't take much more than a brief look at say a 2 hour DVD encoded into a 700MB file(of any codec) to see that the quality is inferior.

 

Check out MythTv. I have been playing around trying to get it setup, and it has some great features you may be interested in...

http://mythtv.org

 

the other thing you must keep in mind when streaming is the constant speed of transfer between your storage unit and your display unit. I ran into a problem streaming uncompressed DVD's that would stutter if the transfer blimped down to far. you would need between 4-6 MBPS to for flawless playback.

 

Thanks guys, I see it's possible, now I just need to decide how to do it. I'm thinking I'd like as small a footprint by the tv as possible. MythTv looks awesome, but it's way overkill, we're happy with out practically free dvr, we just wanna have instant access to our dvds. What size drive do you guys think I should use if I want the entire dvd+extras, and I have about 1200 dvd's.....

 

Well a DVD can hold 4.5 GB, so without any compression you could be looking at up to 5.25 TB of hard drive space.

Quite apart from the cost of everything, it'll take a LOT of time to rip them all.

 

personally I would go with

xbox 1 modded running XBMC
NAS box with 4x750gig for space

stream from NAS box to xbox

rip from PC to NAS box.

you could use DVDshrink to make the files a bit less "nice" and remove some of the other features (subs/diff languges/etc)

if you find you run out of space, get another NAS with more disks in...

 

Most DVDs actually hold over 4.5GB, this is why DVD shrink works, it allows you to compress it down to a 4.5GB disc.

 

avi is a container format - Xvid files, at least, are named as .avi files. Or at least mine are.
For ripping and transcoding, I'd suggest the trio of AnyDVD, DVD Decrypter and AutoGK. Of course the first is technically illegal in the US since it violates the DMCA, but I don't give a crap because fair use means something to me. AnyDVD just sits there and makes it so all disks appear region-free and unencrypted. DVDD rips the files to the hard drive, and AutoGK will encode them to XviD.

At 100% quality settings (in AGK), I see files between 1.5 and 2.5GB, and encodes take about two hours on my fileserver (about half that on my dual-core rig). I'm anal about quality so I won't go below that, but 1GB filesize looks pretty decent in my experience. Of course, it'll depend on your TV as well. And the movie - Saving Private Ryan encoded to nearly 6GB at 100% quality settings, since smoke scenes are horrible to compress without massive artifacting, and it's full of them. And those are all with the best audio available - generally DD5.1, dts on occasion when it's there.

But looking for something that can encode to h.264 might be preferable. An AppleTV (aka iTV) would be the perfect device for you, but ol' Steve made it sound like it works solely though iTunes, and I have no idea if iTunes can handle XviD content in its movies section (never tried tbh, it probably can). Either way, it gets better compression, but takes longer to encode as well, and AutoGK doesn't encode to it so you'll need to find a different encoding program. That Super proggie that Bindi's mentioned a few times probably can do it. I also have no idea how iTunes/AppleTV will handle 5.1 audio, if it's something you care about, but it has optical and HDMI out which both support surround, so I'm sure it's been taken care of. Assuming, of course, that you use that as your set-top box. If you have a spare rig around, just dumping on Windows MCE and buying a remote for it might be an easier choice.